


Bartleby

by Quarantime_Blues



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:21:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 11
Words: 59,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27393391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quarantime_Blues/pseuds/Quarantime_Blues
Summary: That's when she kissed him. It was an experiment, really, a light drag of dry lip against dry lip, just to see if it did anything for her. It didn't. She didn't feel her stomach swoop or her heart flutter. The world didn't stand still or narrow until nothing else mattered. She wasn't even mildly turned-on. There was nothing. Absolutely nothing but dry lip stuttering against dry lip
Relationships: Severus Snape/Original Character(s)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 11





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Author's Notes: This has been a long time coming. Bartleby - alternately titled "My Last Ghost" - was supposed to be a sordid little story intended to address a tired and ugly topic: rape. Specifically, let's invent an OFC, abuse her a little, throw her in with a young Severus Snape, and see what happens.
> 
> A lot ended up happening in the several years since I began writing this. My sordid little story grew a life of its own. In many ways it's an ugly tale, but in other ways it's a surprising one - to me, anyway. Maybe it will surprise you, too.
> 
> *Now Complete*
> 
> This is a fanfic, obviously, and was written only to quiet my internal thoughts and questions. I claim no ownership or rights. Much is borrowed from other sources.

**Prologue**

They called him a prince, but that wasn't quite right.

Princes were charming and handsome and if you kissed one you'd get to live happily ever after.

She didn't even want to think about kissing Snape. His teeth were atrocious, of course – but more to the point, who would dare kiss a god?

That's right. Severus Snape was a god, not a prince. In one little girl's mind, anyway.

Snape and all of them – Avery and Mulciber and even prissy little Regulus – they could do _anything_. They could visit Hogsmeade and keep their own broomsticks and Apparate any time they wanted to. They never got lost in the castle and always had the best spot in the common room: right there where the fire was warm and the chairs were comfortable. They drank firewhisky and laughed and told jokes that would make you go redder than the Hogwarts Express.

She wasn't even allowed to do Glamours yet because she was only 11 years old.

They said that Snape knew more about the Dark Arts than anyone you'd ever met and that he even made – made! – his own curses and spells. Can you believe it? They also said that he was going to be a Death Eater and that the Dark Lord would give him more power than you'd ever dream of having. He was going to fight for them, they said – fight to get rid of all the Mudbloods and Muggle-Lovers and trash that threatened their way of life, and that when it was all over Wizards would be in their rightful place again.

Professor Slughorn didn't like it when they said these things, but she knew it was all true. When Snape and the others graduated a year later, she wished them a secret, sacred prayer of luck in her head and she knew, with all a child's conviction, that everything was going to be okay.

It's funny, isn't it? How the things you thought you knew turn out not to be true. She'd learn that, along with many other things, in the years that followed.

* * *

On September 1st, 1981, Amy Scrivener learned that her childhood god was her new Head of House. The youngest Head of House in all Hogwarts history, no less.

On September 3rd, she learned that her childhood god was a mean, pathetic excuse for a wizard who couldn't lecture worth a damn, never remembered anyone's name, and certainly would not start a Snape Club where you got to eat lovely stuffed pheasant and meet famous people. She felt cheated.

On October 31st, the Dark Lord fell, and she learned that the death of certainty is a very nasty thing indeed. Amy figured that was why Snape locked himself in his office and seldom came out. She felt bad for herself and a little bad for him, too. Everyone else exerted what the Minister called their "inalienable right to party."

On November 4th, one of Amy's Housemates was pulled out of Advanced Potions. The aurors had tracked down his father on the outskirts of Surry and murdered him.

This happened again on November 10th.

And again on January 15th, 1982.

Each time one of Amy's housemates was pulled out of class to receive the news of a loved one's death, a Gryffindor boy hissed over his potion that it was no less than they deserved. Each time, Amy hissed back that he had better watch his filthy Mudblood mouth. Each time, Snape did nothing.

On February 19th, just when things were starting to get back to normal, the news about the Longbottoms broke. That same day, the Ministry passed the Frank and Alice Securities Act. It gave the aurors and the Wizengamot unprecedented power, and she wondered how long it would take them to haul Snape away.

On March 1st, Amy's cousins were arrested, tried, and given a life sentence in Azkaban for the kidnapping and torture of Frank and Alice Longbottom. Slughorn might have gotten her a note excusing her from classes, but Snape got her name wrong and yelled at her for adding the Armadillo bile too early.

On March 2nd, Amy's parents sent her an owl with the advice to keep her head down, and she wondered if that's what Snape was doing there at Hogwarts in the first place - keeping his head down.

On March 22nd, 3 hours before Amy's 17th birthday, she ignored that advice.

She wore her shortest skirt, her tightest blouse, and got very drunk watching the final Quidditch game of the season. When she stumbled back to a mostly-empty castle to find a place to vomit, she happened to run into that Gryffindor boy from potions class. He was doing his Prefect rounds just down the hall from Snape's office.

Amy and the Gryffindor boy exchanged minor curses and nasty, juvenile insults. He wondered aloud who she would fuck now that her cousins were in Azkaban.

"Because that's what you pureblood fanatics do, right? Fuck your own cousins?" he'd asked.

She responded that, since they were on the topic of fucking, maybe he could clear something up for her.

"I've always wondered...Does it even, you know, _work_ the same way with Muggles?" she'd slurred. "Do people like you even _have_ todgers? Or is it just some kind of _gash_ down there?"

So the Gryffindor boy slapped her wand from her hand, shoved her violently to the ground, and showed her that yes, in fact, it _did_ work the same way.

About 90 seconds prior, Severus Snape had cast a Silencing Spell on his office door because their idiotic argument was aggravating his headache.

* * *

In Amy's nightmares, everything but the _thud-thud-thudding_ of her own heartbeat drowned under a low, ringing whine. The noise was colorless; a needling white panic pricking at the edges of vision warped and dulled by the remnants of alcohol and terror.

But in her nightmares, everything was far away and detached. Details didn't lash at her eyeballs with this kind of violent reality. Words like 'political' and 'bias' weren't spat in the Headmaster's office like poison drawn from a wound. Denials weren't flung back into the dreamscape's abyss.

Pain didn't splinter in that place between trembling thighs.

"How something like this could be allowed to happen _right outside your door_ , I can't even fathom!"

"I see, Minerva. So it's _my_ fault that _your_ student—"

"— _My_ student?! _Your_ student is the one who..."

This was wrong.

"…Severus, the curse she used…we all agree that's taking self-defense beyond the pale. And hasn't the boy suffered enough? The Aurors think so…"

This was very wrong.

"I have no idea what prompted this insanity and he will likely die before we get his side of the story, but the boy is a model student and the girl…"

She scrubbed her face with her hands and commanded herself to wake up—wake up!—from this horrible nightmare because this couldn't possibly be her. She could not possibly be the "she" who cast the curse or "the girl" who wasn't a model student. She could not possibly exist like this and it was all so wrong, wrong, wrong.

"…cannot, at this point, rule out the possibility of entrapment."

"Are you _truly_ suggesting…? That is the most preposterous and paranoid thing I have _ever..._ "

"Would you truly put it past some of the students in your House, Severus?"

"Is that what this is about?! You take your House favoritism, wrap it up with a bloody bow and call it 'justice?!'"

"How _dare_ you!"

The harder Amy tried to tune out the voices, the more she heard. Placing her hands on either side of her head, pressing them painfully flat on her ears, did nothing to help. Why wouldn't they stop screaming? Just stop screaming and leave her alone and let her curl up in her threadbare black cloak and—

Her threadbare black cloak.

She didn't own a threadbare black cloak.

And why was there a hospital gown underneath?

"You cannot expect us to be blind to the wider implications…"

"…If and when her parents do arrive..."

"…Minerva and I agree that…"

"...technically still a minor…"

Somebody, somewhere, was making these little animal noises like fingernails hyperventilating against a chalkboard, but it could not have been her, because the noises sounded like panic and death.

And her thigh—oh God, oh Mum, Mummy—what was wrong with—

"…When the Governors—"

"The Governors will _not_ be made aware of this…this… _incident."_

"'Incident?' This is a _farce!"_

"…Severus, we've already spoken with Madam Bones and—

"Yes, your _good friend_ Madam Bones, whom you installed not a fortnight ago—"

" _That_ is paranoid and prepost—"

"The fact remains: attempted murder trumps attempted ra—"

"— _'Attempted'?!_ "

The door creaked horribly above her head as somebody flung it open. It felt like her heart had exploded somewhere in the vicinity of her throat and her vision seemed choppy and wrong as she whipped her head up to see the angriest man in the entire sodding world looming darkly above.

She saw his long, spidery hand twitch as if in slow motion, and she knew what he was going to do and she tried to cringe away and escape like she'd tried last time, but her body wouldn't move and she couldn't find her wand and she couldn't stop the hand from curling around her upper arm and pulling her roughly to her feet.

She struggled, or tried to, but he was stronger than her and spun her around to face the door and then jerked her inside in one swift movement. The world swam nauseatingly and the adults were so very angry and she felt like she was five years old again and— _oh my God—Oh my God—what is he doing?!_

She gasped and tried to scream, but the pieces of her heart were still blocking her throat and she was absolutely terrified because his hand was _there_ again where it didn't belong and it was tugging at the hem of her gown.

"Severus! What are you—?"

This was not just humiliation, because you can't die from humiliation and she was sure she would die. Because by the time the hand dropped her clothes or she pushed it away—she wasn't sure which happened first—they all knew. They knew that she was a Death Eater whore because it said so on her thigh. There was a crude imitation of a Dark Mark and the word "WHORE" branded there in pimples and boils and pus and they all knew. They knew and that's why the Headmaster and Professor McGonagall were looking at her so strangely and that's why Professor Snape was shouting again, his syllables crashing to the floor with ironic gravity.

"Behold the handiwork of your 'model student.' You must be so proud."

"That was uncalled for!"

She wasn't aware, really, of swaying on her feet, because her vision was black and warped and her brain wouldn't seem to function, but somehow time was passing without her consent and she was on her hands and knees on the floor, drowning under the needling white whine.

"...Minerva, get her out of here. Severus, don't do this now."

Professor Snape was pointing at her where she had fallen into as a million sordid little pieces on the floor. She wasn't a person; she was some indecent animal or thing on display behind glass. Even her own body hated her, wanted to expel her. Why else should it be forcing her to dry retch so violently in front of these people? Her face was wet and she tried to breathe over the frenzied contractions of her stomach, but she couldn't seem to get any air.

"…didn't even bother with a Sobering Solution. She will not remember a thing, so feel free: call her the Death Eater whore you believe her to be!"

"Severus, please!"

* * *

They asked her a lot of questions after that.

They asked her if she understood—really understood—what she had done. She didn't really know how to answer that question. She'd been there, right? She'd cast the Entrail-Expelling Curse, hadn't she? She'd watched her rapist turn inside-out; vomit up all twenty feet of his own intestines along with buckets of blood and shit. Yeah, she thought she understood what she had done.

They asked her why she did it, why she hadn't cast a Disarming Spell or _Petrificus Totatlus_ or something. She didn't know how to answer that question, either. He'd raped her, hadn't he? Beat her and raped her and forced her to bear a curse scar of a skull and snake and the word "WHORE."

There were some legal conversations that she didn't really understand. Something about the statutory definition of rape and how it required the man to…finish. How it didn't really count that he'd only put it inside her. They talked about the inadmissibility of memory evidence and something about an Non-Disclosure Enchantment. She signed some parchment that said she was guilty of grievous bodily harm and would happily follow certain terms of probation.

They called her promiscuous, and they wondered aloud why she would put herself in a situation like that - drunk and alone with the boy.

She was lucky that boy survived, they told her. And lucky that Madam Bones had given her a plea agreement, because Crouch wouldn't have even given her a trial. She was lucky that Professor Snape had told the Aurors that she was a good student.

She didn't feel very lucky and she didn't think there was anything very personal in Snape's defending her and lying for her. If she were in the mood to play her hand at amateur psychoanalysis, she'd say that Snape came to her defense because the affair probably reminded him of his own school years, when the Headmaster and that McGonagall bitch sided with their precious House against him.

Her parents took her on vacation to this beautiful beach in France and the only thing to do was sunbathe and read. The only book was something Slughorn had given her ages ago as a joke. It had her name in the title: _Bartleby the Scrivener_ by Herman Melville. It was about a law clerk - or scrivener - who has a mental breakdown one day. He stops working, stops eating - stops doing _anything_ at all. Whenever anyone asks something of him, he just says "I'd prefer not to."

Amy had no idea what the point of the story was supposed to be. She sent an owl to Slughorn to ask him about it, but he never did answer. She wondered then if Snape liked literature, but decided that it seemed unlikely because there was no way that such an austere ass could enjoy great stories.

They made her go back for her seventh year because of those papers she'd signed. There was something supremely absurd about her school uniform with its skirt and blouse and tie. It seemed indecent, somehow, and she hoped other people wouldn't notice that it made her look like a whore.


	2. A Baptism by Fire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's Notes: This has been a long time coming. Bartleby - alternately titled "My Last Ghost" - was supposed to be a sordid little story intended to address a tired and ugly topic: rape. Specifically, let's invent an OFC, abuse her a little, throw her in with a young Severus Snape, and see what happens.
> 
> A lot ended up happening in the several years since I began writing this. My sordid little story grew a life of its own. In many ways it's an ugly tale, but in other ways it's a surprising one - to me, anyway. Maybe it will surprise you, too.
> 
> I will be updating regularly. Please feel free to review.
> 
> This is a fanfic, obviously, and was written only to quiet my internal thoughts and questions. I claim no ownership or rights. Much is borrowed from other sources.

* * *

Myron Wagtail was an eccentric but good-looking 7th year who skyrocketed from relative obscurity to instant fame during his third year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Myron had been something of a curiosity in those early days. There was absolutely no doubt that the boy had talent, but the trouble was, he also had a cello.

Myron's cello was a perpetual third wheel; a weird adornment that followed him everywhere he went. He took it to class. He polished it. He tuned it. If certain rumors were to be believed, he even _slept_ with it. But Myron did not, to anyone's knowledge, ever actually _play_ that cello.

Not until Professor Slughorn invited—or rather, _dared_ —him to four years ago.

It took a solid hour of harassment, but Myron did, eventually, take the center stage at one of Slughorn's Club dinners. Clearly agitated, the attractive third-year sat stiffly in a chair, rosined his bow, and proceeded not to _play_ his cello, but to _attack_ it.

Myron Wagtail attacked that instrument with such discordant, string-breaking intensity that, when he was finished, every single person in the room sat in utterly stunned silence. They'd never heard anything like it before. It was shocking. It was bold. It was original. It was really, _really_ good.

"My dear boy!" a breathless Horace Slughorn finally exclaimed. "Such talent! Such innovation! What do you call it?"

The thirteen-year old savant flipped his hair out of his face.

"Rock and roll, Professor. I call it rock and roll."

And, just like that, Myron shed the awkward mantle of his early adolescence. He left the cello in the practice room and carried in its place confidence, charm, and all the seductive appeal of a rebel. Now a prefect at the top of his class, captain of the Slytherin Quidditch team, and proud owner of the longest eyelashes you've ever seen on a boy, Myron was simply born to succeed.

How disappointing for him to be paired with Amy.

Amy watched as Myron, for the umpteenth time that hour, raised his wand, shouted " _Expecto Patronum!_ " failed to produce a corporeal Patronus, and swore colorfully. He was not so accustomed to failure as Amy was, and didn't take it very well.

"Stupid—Bloody—what sort of idiot invents a spell that you have to be _happy_ to perform? In the middle of a fight with a _Dementor?"_ he asked, and, really, he had a point about that. Myron continued his tirade with facetious gravity: "Oh, excuse me, evil soul-sucking fiend, while I reminisce about the Christmas of '77, when I got that wank magazine I've always wanted."

"Uh-huh," said Amy.

Way back in fifth year, when he was in his Philosophical Stage and talked about Authenticity a lot, he told Amy about this mad Kraut who ran around screaming that God was dead. She still didn't have any idea what that was supposed to mean.

" _Expecto Patronum_!" cried Myron again, but nothing happened.

"Think positive, boys and girls!" somebody called from the top of the classroom. "Let your spirit animal reveal itself!"

The speaker was the D.A.D.A. Professor of the year, a dumpy, eternally positive housewitch-turned-educator with a passion for guiding young people and a baffling interest in what she called "Muggle Metaphysics." Her last name was "Burbage" and her first name not terribly memorable - some abstract noun like "Charity," or "Chastity," or some other quality Amy lacked.

"It'll take some time," said Professor Noun, "but just keep trying!"

Myron, unmoved by the encouragement, gave up trying to conjure his Patronus—or "spirit animal"—and fell into the seat next to Amy. He stretched a lean, well-muscled torso, frowned at the ceiling, and continued complaining:

"Perfect ending to the first month back. First, I'm up all night on that Transfiguration essay, and of course they serve bloody _kippers_ for breakfast. And then I learn that Hufflepuff's very own Gwenog Jones has the Quidditch pitch booked through the first game." He nodded toward the top of the classroom, where the aforementioned Gwenog Jones, Myron's chief rival for the Most Popular Person At Hogwarts Award, looked like she was having the time of her life.

Myron scoffed. "I _tried_ talking to Professor Snape about it. I mean, you'd reckon he'd _want_ to see the Quidditch Cup in his office, for once, but he was just—" Myron then drew himself up to his full height and put on a mask of ill-humored indifference that, presumably, was supposed to be an impression of Professor Snape. He dropped his voice about an octave and made a sweeping gesture around the room "'—Look at them, Mr. Wagtail. Look at all the fucks I don't give.' "

"Myron, dear, did you need something? I saw you waving your arms?" Professor Noun called, because she was the sort of person who believed that the current state of education could be revolutionized if only teachers were _friendlier_ and called students by their first names now and again.

"No, Professor," said Myron, dropping the impersonation. "I was just telling Amy that I reckon my spirit animal will be _this big,"_ he said, and raised his arms again as if measuring the five-foot fish that had gotten away.

"It's not the size of the Patronus, dear, it's how you—oh, very funny," the Professor chastised, as several people had begun to snigger.

"He didn't _actually_ say that, of course," Myron conceded more quietly, turning back to Amy. "It was something about Hogwarts bylaws and his hands being tied until they elect a new school Governor and 'don't bother me with this drivel, Mr. Wagtail.' You did hear that the Malfoy fellow resigned over the summer? He'd been on the governing board for _ages_ , too _._ "

"Uh-huh," said Amy.

"Are you even listening?" he asked.

"Yes. It's _fascinating_ , Myron."

Myron tsked her. "You know what your problem is, Amy? You think _everything_ is boring. You're such a drag lately." He snatched his copy of _Getting Familiar with Familiars_ from the table, looking sour, and began flipping through it aggressively. "And you've really got to start going to Potions," he told her. "I'm tired of covering for you."

Amy's been working on this theory. It was an indisputable fact that one simply did not skip Professor Snape's class. It just wasn't done. Ergo, she was, in some mystical way, still attending, right?

Right?

"All you have to do is show up," Myron chided.

Yeah, show up and watch as Snape's jaw did this thing where it clenched as soon as she walked through the door. He seemed to get livid as hell any time their eyes accidentally met over a potion, across the Great Hall, or anywhere else for that matter. And their eyes _did_ meet. They met often. It may have been simple paranoia, but she could have sworn Snape had taken to staring at her.

Of course, maybe she only noticed because she'd taken to staring at _him_ with neurotic frequency, as though one of these days he wouldn't be looking at her with such anger.

She didn't think it had anything to do with her personally, the anger. It might have been that she represented something for him, something that involved words like 'political' and 'bias.' Maybe he felt guilty for not being in his office at the time of the...incident. Still, it made her uncomfortable and she'd been avoiding him all semester.

"…Not like Slughorn's class," Myron was saying. "No lesson plan, no help, just 'turn to page 394 and figure out how to make this ridiculously complicated potion so I can give you a 'T' when you fail.'"

As if Myron had ever received a 'T' on anything in his life. Amy used her quill to scrape some dirt from under her fingernails. You'd think there'd be a spell for that.

"You know he's yet to give back a single essay? Bastard can't even be bothered to _grade_. Snape's Patronus is probably a bloody _cockroach_ —look, there's one in here—I mean, what sort of person would conjure a _cockroach_?" Myron asked.

"Gregor," said Amy, who now had ink under her nails in addition to the dirt.

Myron looked at her. "Who?"

"Whom."

He made a face. "Huh?"

"What? Nothing. Nobody. Never mind."

"Right…" He looked at her sideways—wondering if she were somehow responsible for his bad month, perhaps—and then flipped an errant bit of hair from his face. He did this often.

"Well, _anyway…_ This on top of Alex resigning. I know she's taken that whole thing with her uncle Augustus pretty hard, but what are we supposed to do with one Beater? I mean, I could always pull Tremlett from the Chasers, but then—"

"Look, everyone! Gwen's nearly got it!" Professor Noun interrupted from the top of the class. And, indeed, Gwenog Jones had managed to conjure a bright, if formless, ball of light. Several in the immediate vicinity clapped.

"Tosser," Myron huffed.

Amy scraped at her nails some more and watched the cockroach-patronus skit nervously across its page. It was a funny way to profess your atheism, screaming that God was dead. He'd have to have been alive in the first place, wouldn't He? She felt hopelessly stupid when she tried to think about it, just like she did when she'd read that _Bartleby_ book Slughorn had given her. She wondered, idly, what Snape would think about the matter.

"…So have you turned in a proposal for your senior project, yet?" Myron was asking. "It's due this week."

"I'm working on it," Amy lied. The Aurors had made her go back for her 7th year, but they'd never said anything about a senior project. They'd never mentioned anything about going to class or passing, either.

" _I've_ got permission to leave campus once a week for my project, starting next semester," Myron said, sounding rather smug. "Field research. Got it approved last year."

Amy looked over at him in disbelief. " _Snape_ approved that?"

"What? God, no. Dumbledore did. Snape couldn't be bothered to approve _anybody's_ project last year. I keep forgetting you missed those last few weeks on account of your mum."

On account of her Mum. Right.

"How is she, by the way?"

"Fine," Amy said. "It was just dragonpox."

"I thought it was splattergroit?" Myron said.

"Right. Splatterpox. Dragongroit. Nasty mix."

"Oh! That reminds me - there was post for you this morning. I left the package in the Common Room, but I have the note in here, somewhere," Myron said, picking up his bag. He began rifling through it for the lost note.

Her heart leapt. Had Slughorn finally written her back?

"Found it. Here you go, Amy." He held the note out to her.

She snatched it up and began to read.

"Jeez, Amy, you look as though someone's just told you there's a Muggle in the family—God, your mum didn't _die,_ did she?"

She was saved answering by the bell.

"Don't forget!" cried the professor over the din, "I want fifteen inches on your spirit animal by Monday!"

* * *

Amy's parents still love to tell the story of her first solo Floo trip. It's something of a rite of passage in the wizarding world that usually happens somewhere between potty training and Hogwarts. Some parents, the good ones, introduce their children gently and gradually. Others, like Amy's, push their offspring into the flames with little preparation and no warning.

A baptism by fire.

Her parents' friends all think the story is hilarious, but Amy only remembers the trepidation of staring at the hearth, larger than life to a child, and the later, lingering paranoia that anyone, at any time, might decide to shove you into the blaze and send you spinning out of control.

That's what Professor Snape's door reminded her of. She was nine years old in her stupid, ugly whore skirt, tiny and overwhelmed by the scale of the Castle's woodwork. Her parents were there in spirit, forcing her across the threshold with a gift. For Snape. Her parents' polite thanks for his defense in the form of a brand-new cloak.

Or else their insulting suggestion that he couldn't be trusted to dress himself. She wasn't sure.

Either way, it was soft, black, and clearly very expensive. She probably should have wrapped it or something.

Amy must have stood outside that door for a good five minutes, working up the courage to knock, when it opened slowly, its rusted hinges creaking. Spooked, she jumped back.

Professor Snape, dark and imposing as ever, gave a kind of miniature sigh and scowled down his great ugly nose at her. The cords in his neck tightened. "Well?" he said, as if prompting an especially stupid first-year.

"I—sir?"

"Well, do you plan to stand there for another five minutes like a feckless idiot, or would you like to come in?" he snapped.

It was strange that she didn't remember him being this acerbic when he was a god to her.

She looked away from his probing gaze, quailing, and nodded. "Sure."

The young professor turned and stalked out of the doorway, gesturing her to follow with a curt little move of the hand. She took one shuffling step inside before realizing that he'd left her with the impossible conundrum of the door. Her fingers hesitated on the knob.

"Leave it," he said over his shoulder, either because he could read minds and knew she didn't really want to be trapped alone with him, or because he didn't want to be alone with her, either. She left it open and looked around at the office, so changed from Slughorn's time. There was no comfort, anymore. No warmth. No candied pineapple. All was hard planes and angles and dead things mortified in Preserving Solution.

Snape settled himself in an austere chair behind the desk. "You may sit," he offered neutrally.

She sat and stared at a particularly disgusting pickled specimen on his desk. It looked something like a flayed toad, and she had this strange thought that she sympathized with it. She wanted to bury it so that nobody would look at it, naked and dehumanized, ever again.

"Tea?" Snape asked, brusque and bored.

"Er, sure. Thanks," she told the specimen.

With a flick of his wand a tea tray appeared between them. They poured their own cups.

An extremely uncomfortable few seconds passed by while they waited for their drinks to cool.

Then, abruptly, "How are the dittany treatments progressing?"

She hazarded a glance at him, mortified, before looking steadfastly away. He didn't look particularly interested in the answer, merely sour and perfunctory, like he thought he might as well just make some awkward, half-assed effort to…care. By asking about her curse scar. On her thigh. The one her attacker had given her. Of course he knew about the treatments; he probably made the potions.

She shoved her hands into her pockets. "Er. Okay. I guess."

They were both blessedly saved from having to continue on that topic by a knock on the door. Amy and Professor Snape looked sideways at the noise in tandem.

It was Filch of all people who poked his head into the room, and he looked as though Christmas had just come early.

"Professor—a quick word if you—" Filch began in those oily tones of his, giving a sycophant little bow.

But the young professor had already risen and was gesturing Filch out. "In the hall," he said curtly.

Amy half-hoped he'd dismiss her, but he merely swept out into the corridor without another word.

The door clicked shut behind him.

"Found one when I was sweepin' in the corridor—came right to you with it," Filch was saying in low, excited tones. She could just barely make out their conversation through the door.

There was an unnatural silence for at least a minute. And then—

"As you saw, Professor, _nasty_ business," Filch was saying. He couldn't have sounded happier about it. "If I could only get the approval forms for flogging—"

"I'll look into it, Filch," Snape said.

"Professor, it would be a simple matter—"

"I said I'll look into it," he snapped.

Filch's shuffling steps retreated back to whatever rock he'd crawled out from under, and Snape returned to his office, looking immensely irritated. His eyes flicked toward her as he sat down again, but she only seemed to make him angrier. He looked away once more and busied himself by opening up a desk drawer. Amy drank her tea, anxious to leave.

"You're failing Potions," he told her without preamble.

"I know," she replied apologetically.

Snape gave a disapproving tut and reached into the pocket of his robes. She thought, for one insane moment, that he was going to pull out his wand and hex her for being such a piss-poor student, but all he did was retrieve what looked strangely like a Christmas bauble and dump it unceremoniously into his desk.

He then withdrew a small, battered flask from the same drawer and poured a measure of clear liquid into his tea. Amy caught a faint whiff of something juniper-y and antiseptic, like an evergreen forest meets a hospital, but it wasn't any potion she recognized. He didn't offer any explanation for this bizarre exchange, either, but merely gave her a nasty look when he caught her staring, as if daring her to say something about the whole thing.

She didn't.

"Are you planning on submitting your senior exit strategy for review anytime soon?" he asked.

"I'm working on it," she lied for the second time that day.

"Then I assume you had some other reason for coming here? Or have we covered it?"

Right. She'd almost forgotten.

"No. I, ah…My parents wanted me to give you this," she forced out, retrieving the package from her bag and shoving it across his desk. "It's to replace the one that you gave—the one that I—the one that got lost."

Snape looked at the cloak but elected not to comment.

"I don't know what happened to it. I don't remember how I even ended up with it," she continued. It seemed important to clarify that.

His fathomless eyes flicked toward her. "No, I don't suppose you would."

"I don't remember much," her mouth insisted without bothering to first consult her brain.

Stupid. _Stupid-Stupid-Stupid_.

"Shame, really. I understand there's a flourishing black market in illicit memories. You might have made a fortune for your trouble," he said, impassive and dead-pan.

That made her gape unattractively at him because it was the most ridiculously inappropriate thing anybody had ever said to her. The few people who knew looked at her like she was either a ruined, pitiable thing, or else a potential murderess. Never had anybody made light of her situation, and she was certain that Severus Snape had just made a _joke_. A dry, extremely macabre, not-very-funny joke, but a joke nevertheless. She hadn't thought he possessed any humor whatsoever.

"Close your mouth, Miss Scrivener, you'll let the pixies in."

So she closed her mouth, finished her tea, and decided that maybe Snape was okay, after all. This was the first time since he'd been installed as Head of House that he'd remembered her name correctly, anyway.

Then he gave her a month's detention for failing so many classes and generally sucking at life.

* * *

Amy's hair is limp and lifeless. The color of dishwater. Of a decade's soap scum caked onto a porcelain sink.

She has these two roommates that, over the last seven years, she's gotten to know fairly well. Fiona was an exceptionally pretty idiot with the loveliest honey-blonde hair Amy has ever seen. Every night before bed, she'd brush it into a great, frizzy mess, and then spend the next several hours twist-twist-twisting golden locks around her index finger. She'd coil them up into these tight springs, release them, and by lights-out her head would be covered in these perfect Victorian ringlets. It was strongly reminiscent of a powdered wig.

Alex, a foul-mouthed beater with an endless supply off-color jokes—the one Myron said was apparently taking something about her Uncle Augie pretty hard—also had good hair. This was probably because Alex knew every Hair Charm in the world. Braids were her specialty—Big braids, little braids; long braids, short braids. Sometimes she chose to tease her hair out into a big curly mass; other times, she'd ply it with relaxing potions. Alex was forever harassing her hair and frequently got into fights with the mirror over it ('the mirror,' she liked to claim, 'is a fucking racist'). Amy had always liked Alex's hair. It was dynamic, exciting, and vivacious. It was also the loveliest blue-black.

But Amy's hair is limp and lifeless. Not unlike Snape's, actually, just a lot less greasy.

Wand pointed to her own head, she tried yet again to do something about this. She gave her wand a hopeful sort of flourish, and her hair gave a pathetic little quiver before lying dead again.

"Amy. Amy, Amy, Amy," said Alex, shaking her head from the spot by the grate. They were Seventh-Years, now, and had claimed the best spot in the common room.

Amy lowered her hand-mirror. "Alex. Alex, Alex, Alex," she mocked.

Alex gave a dramatic, put-upon sigh, pointed her wand straight at Amy's head, and made an aggressive motion. Unfamiliar magic scuttled over Amy's scalp as her hair arranged itself into something that, hopefully, would improve it.

She raised the hand mirror again and was immediately surprised. She looked...pretty. Yes, Reflection-Amy looked pretty. Alex's charm had styled her hair into some kind of complicated up-do. Or something. She's never been great with fashion.

"Thank you," she said, looking back up.

Alex waved her hand vaguely, as though it were the easiest thing in the world to make yourself appear agreeable to other people, and began copying Fiona's Charms homework.

Behind her, several fourth-year boys were roughhousing and laughing while they teased a fourth-year girl. The girl seemed to be enjoying the attention.

"Lucky," Fiona pouted to Amy. She was sprawled across one of the Common Room couches with a copy of Witch Weekly, and had a finger poised some five inches from her temple with a lock of hair half-curled around it. "If I did that, it would look like somebody'd Spelled a hippogriff tail to my head." Whatever that meant.

Alex laughed somewhat maliciously at that, but Fiona ignored her.

"So, you got a _date_ , Amy?" Fiona asked with an air of girlish gossip that made Amy want to give her a bloody nose. "I hear Myro—"

"Detention," Amy interrupted. 'Date' and 'Snape' were not words that belonged in the same library, let alone in the same sentence.

Alex leaned in Amy's direction. "Is that why you're getting all tarted up? Hoping he'll raise your grade?"

"No, no. I—"

"You're wasting your time," Alex insisted over Fiona's giggles. "Fiona already tried—"

"Oh my God, _gross,_ Alex," Fiona interrupted. "I'd _never!"_

"Oh, don't get all high and mighty on me, Fiona. Everybody knows how you got that _Prophet_ internship last summer," Alex said.

"Not by coming on to a greasy, hook-nosed—"

Amy put her mirror away and stared at the fourth-years. The boys seemed to be trying to convince the girl to do…something. She sat up for a better look.

"—You're always going on about _rugged_ men, Fiona. Don't you think he's _rugged_?"

Behind Alex, the fourth-year girl was making a show of refusing to touch whatever one of the boys was trying to hand her— something?—Amy couldn't see it clearly.

"—Like he could just _grab_ you and-"

"— _Eww!"_

The 4th-year girl, giggling madly, finally reached out for the—Christmas bauble? It looked exactly like the thing she'd seen in Snape's office, the one he'd put in his desk before pulling out that ill-smelling tonic.

"— _Rugged_ like he could just _ravish_ you and—"

"What are they doing?" Amy interrupted, loudly enough to be heard over the bickering.

Her roommates turned to look at the scene. The 4th-year girl had the bauble-thing in her hand and was standing, stock-still, with her eyes closed. The boys watched her eagerly for a reaction. And then, quite suddenly, the girl dropped the bauble with a half-delighted, half-horrified little squeal.

"Just stupid fourth-year stuff. Looking at…well, _porn_ , most like," said Fiona in a whisper.

Amy frowned. "Porn? How—"

"Hey!" Alex interrupted, yelling at the group. "Pipe the fuck down! And give that here—Memoriballs are banned."

One of the boys started to protest, but Alex flicked her wand in a silent Summoning Spell and the object zoomed into her waiting hand.

"Hey, you're not a prefect!" he whined.

"And you're a shite Chaser, but we go to war with the army we have, don't we? Now piss off," Alex yelled back.

The fourth-years shuffled off.

"Are you going to turn that in?" Fiona asked Alex. "Snape's been really strict about those this year."

"What? God, no. I'm going to watch it," said Alex happily. "Want to join me?"

" _Gross._ I'm not—" Fiona began.

"But what _is_ it?" Amy interrupted.

"A Memoriball," said Alex, as though that clarified everything. "You know, like a 'memorial,' only it's a ball, so—"

"Yeah, I got it. But what's it made of? Is there, like, a memory in there?" Amy asked.

"Could be, I guess." Alex shrugged.

"I thought you needed a Pensieve to do that," said Amy.

"Well, sure, if you've about a million galleons and want to do the thing properly," Alex said.

"What, so people go do something they think other people would want to see and then sell their memory of it?" Amy asked, thinking about Snape's off-color joke. She might have made a fortune for her trouble.

"That's the idea," said Alex. "Fantasies, you know—something to watch when you're bored. Only, not too long. Your brain will turn to mush."

"Mush?" Amy repeated, hoping Alex would elaborate.

Alex tapped her head. "Yup, _mush_. 'It doesn't do to dwell in memories' and all that. Stay too long, watch too many times in a row, your brain will liquefy. So, they're banned."

"I think they're sick," Fiona interjected decisively. "I hear there's one where the Minister eats a live octopus!"

"That isn't the Minister, you idiot. That's just some bloke Polyjuiced into him. _Everyone_ knows that," said Alex.

"I heard people Polyjuice into _kids_ in those!" Fiona insisted.

Alex rolled her eyes. "Even if that were _true_ , and it's not, it's still just a fantasy. They don't hurt anybody—hell, if they keep the whack-jobs from bothering _real_ people, the inventor should get a bloody Order of Merlin. Sure you don't want to watch? No? How about you, Amy?"

Amy shook her head.

"Wimps," Alex said and, with that, closed her eyes and held the Memoriball tightly in her fist. She froze for all of ten seconds before dropping the thing with a laugh. "Oh. My. God!" she exclaimed. "Where's Myron? Is he here?—Myron!—MYRON! You've _got_ to see this! It's DISGUSTING!"

And she was off, running in the direction of the boys' dorms. Amy stared.

"Hey, Amy?" Fiona said after a bit.

"What?"

"Weren't you supposed to be in detention, like, twenty minutes ago?"

Amy checked her watch.

Fuck.

* * *

Amy lied before, when she said she didn't know how she came to have her professor's cloak. She does.

It wasn't one of those things she legitimately doesn't remember, like how she managed to get from that empty classroom to the Hospital Wing in the first place. Neither is it one of those things she refuses to remember, like what happened before that. She simply lied about it.

She is a Slytherin, after all, and she believes that the truth is open to interpretation.

Even still, she'll admit that reality must have at least a skeleton of immutability; there must exist a set of barest facts, and those facts are these: She ended up, somehow, at the Hospital Wing. She submitted, barely, to a humiliating and ultimately pointless exam. At some point after that, Snape showed up.

He'd appeared for some reason and started to say something, but it died on his lips when he saw what was Marked on her thigh, visible where her hospital gown had ridden up. For about three whole seconds, every bone in his body seemed to become fused to its neighbor, he was so still. He took in a sharp breath, and she was riveted to the flare of his nostrils; the sudden feral tilt to his lips; the brief vision of crooked teeth barred. It was only then that she truly began to panic, because she had never seen anything so like hatred in her life.

What _he_ had done? That was child's play, compared to what the look on Snape's face promised.

She has no idea, in retrospect, if Snape actually dragged her out of bed as violently as she thinks he did, but he certainly wasn't gentle. This wasn't like in a trashy romance novel, when the knight in shining armor came to carry his poor, abused witch to a land of eternal sunshine and spotless minds. Snape had no kind words, and she wouldn't have wanted any reassuring touches even if he had any to give her. He did not even let her put her shoes on.

How she ended up with the cloak was this: Afterthought.

After the staccato of Snape's boots against the stone and Madam Pomfrey's shrill, shrieking protests; after the exquisite cruelty of the pain of the journey to the Headmaster's office; after being dumped unceremoniously on the floor outside it; after all of that, the thought.

What was it, Snape?

What was it that made you pause?

Was it in some small fit of propriety remembered that you unfastened your cloak?

Was it in regret that you let it fall over my body?

There is probably some profound extended metaphor here about the truth being a skeleton, and our interpretations being the muscles that make it move. Maybe there is something about the shitty things we do to ourselves being the fat that weighs it down, and the shitty things life does to us being the scars that give it character. But Amy isn't really a writer, and she definitely isn't a poet.

She is only a liar.

Amy the Liar stood at the door outside Snape's classroom, took a shaky breath, and raised her fist to knock. Snape's face swam in her mind's eye, scowling and outraged. She could feel the ghost of his hand, suddenly, where it had curled around her arm those few months ago. His words echoed in her mind: _"Call her the Death Eater Whore you believe her to be!"_

Her fist lowered to her side. She turned around and started walking back to the dorms.

It was an indisputable fact that one did not skip detention with Professor Snape. It simply wasn't done. Ergo, in some mystical way, she'd actually attended, right?

Right?


	3. Learn with Me

One of the things that most people do not know about Professor Silvanus Kettleburn is that he's a complete jackass.

Seriously.

Just listen:

"You have already completed your first unit of NEWT-level coursework in the Care of Magical Creatures," he told his class as they shivered by the groundskeeper's hut on a drizzly day in late October." Unless, of course, you haven't, in which case you have denied yourself a wonderful experience which you shall never, ever have the opportunity to repeat. But you will have the rest of your lives for regret! Our next unit—"

Here he waved his wand, and the neon-green word 'Naturalism' appeared in the air.

"—is pedagogical rather than practical in nature. During it, you will gain an everlasting appreciation for the natural world and a basic understanding of biology, ecology, and the related 'ologies' which your well-meaning but ignorant parents failed to teach you! We will learn, among other things, the principles of fieldwork and the academic standards of this subject. After all, we cannot forget the unfortunate case of Barry Bottlebrow, who embarrassed himself before the International Conference of Wizards as he described the Frog-Rabbit as a distinct new species, when in fact that unlucky specimen is an example of…? Yes, Mister Wagtail."

"A frog-rabbit is happens when you muck up a Conjuring Spell, Sir."

Kettleburn nodded. "And thus cannot be considered a distinct species because…Anyone? No? Because natural creatures, even fantastic ones, arise through a process of natural selection—"

Here he waved his wand again, and the neon-green words 'natural selection,' appeared under the title of the unit.

A very prissy-looking Ravenclaw girl dared to contradict him: "But, sir, it clearly says in _Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them_ that— "

Kettleburn interrupted the girl. "Yes, Newt Scamander has included Ashwinders and Lethifolds as creatures rather than magical phenomena, but he would be _wrong_. In fact, if it weren't for certain lucrative kickbacks and publishing contracts, you would not be holding that book before you at all. But we must make do!" he boomed, clapping his hands together. "Your first assignment: tear out those offensive pages, using what you have just learned about the good practices of taxonomy."

"Tear out…?" somebody, another Ravenclaw, sputtered. "But…I paid nine galleons for this!"

"Nine?! Well, my dear boy, it seems you've been robbed of your gold as well as your education!" Kettleburn shouted, every word becoming progressively louder. "I suggest you write the Board of Governors, Mr. Fawcett, just as soon as they elect a new Head. But what's this…? Mr. Wagtail, it seems you have no problem carrying out the assignment. Are you not offended on behalf of books everywhere?"

"Language is living, sir, and books the artefacts of changing culture!" Myron shouted back, tearing several pages from his book at random.

"Such eloquent nonsense! Now who said that, Mr. Wagtail?"

"Herman Melville!"

"He did no such thing! Have you any idea who Melville is, Mr. Wagtail?"

"None whatsoever, Sir!"

"See, Mr. Fawcett, how easy it is to admit your ignorance? And now I must award ten points to Slytherin for Mr. Wagtail's sporting attitude; it may be the first time in the history of his House!"

"Thank you, Sir!"

"And who is this, next to you, Mister Wagtail, and why isn't she ripping pages from her book?"

"Amy Scrivener, Sir, and she left it in the dorms!"

"Scrivener, eh? Well, make like a scrivener and copy! The phrase, 'I shan't ever forget to bring Newt Scamander's terrible book to class ever again,' 100 times, on my desk tomorrow morning."

See? Complete jackass.

Of course, he had his positive qualities. Kettleburn was an entertaining lecturer, generous with House points, and seemed to have a genuine and enduring fondness for all living things, even snotty Ravenclaws and brown-nosing Slytherins.

After they were all done defacing their books and Amy had copied the line about Newt Scamander's terrible text thirty-two times, Kettleburn told the class to break up into two groups and 'go identify something.'

"Go identify _what?"_ asked the prissy Ravenclaw.

"Something _living,_ my dear," he answered. "Identify it, sketch it, and report back here at the end of the hour. Whichever group has managed to make the greatest number of positive identifications shall win—nothing! You shall win nothing. This is a class, not a charity auction. Well, off you go!" he said, and promptly conjured a lawn chair out of thin air.

"And don't litter," he added as he sat and pulled out a birding book and a pair of omnoculars. "Leave the marvelous outdoors just the way you found it!"

Amy and her Housemates went one way; the prissy Ravenclaws, another.

"You ever get the sense Kettleburn's just sort of phoning it in until retirement?" Myron asked as they approached the edge of the Black Lake, out of earshot of anybody but the squid.

"Well, that's why we took this class, isn't it?" Alex said. "Easy 'O.'" She sat on a rock and pulled a small leather pouch and what looked like rolling papers out of her pocket. "Want to hear a joke?" she asked without prelude.

Fiona wrinkled her nose. "Alex, your jokes are terrible," she said.

"So a vampire walks into a bar," Alex began anyway, now rolling what looked suspiciously like a joint.

Settling in for the long hall, Amy flipped over a rock with her shoe and started sketching the roly-poly that wasn't under it.

"And the barkeep asks, 'What'll it be, mate?'" Alex licked the edge of the cigarette-possibly-joint and closed it up. "And the vampire asks for some hot water, right?"

"Right," said Myron.

"And the barkeep says, 'what, you don't want a teabag or nuffin?'"

"I hope this isn't a bollocks joke," Amy said, which caused Myron to laugh and, for some unfathomable reason, touch her arm lightly.

"Then the vampire shakes his head and says, 'Nah, mate. I brought my own,'" Alex continued, undeterred. She paused to pack the maybe-cigarette with the end of her wand, milking the joke for all it was worth, and delivered the punchline: "And he pulls out a tampon."

"That is _disgusting_ ," Fiona said. Because it was. But Myron just laughed and Alex smirked before finally lighting up. A smell that was definitely not tobacco wafted Amy's way.

Fiona wrinkled her nose again. "If Snape catches you smoking one of those—"

"He'll _what?_ " Alex snapped with sudden ferocity. "Lock himself in his office again? Please. Snape doesn't give a shit about us. I could set us on fire with this thing and he wouldn't piss to put us out."

"Oh, pretty imagery there," said Myron. "I did _not_ want to think about Snape's todger."

Alex scoffed. "I don't think he's even _got_ a todger. Dumbledore's probably got it in a box. Everyone knows he's that old fool's stooge."

Alex had a fondness for saying that 'everybody' knew things, and one of the things 'everybody' was supposed to know was that Snape was a Death Eater turncoat who'd betrayed the Dark Lord and came to work for the Headmaster. Amy, who now had ownership of the joint and paused her roly-poly sketch to puff it contemplatively, thought privately that Alex was full of shit. If Snape was supposed to be some kind of…of _murderer_ masquerading as a mild academic, he wasn't doing a very good job of it.

Myron humored Alex. "So you think that's why he's been in such a pissy mood lately? Because Dumbledore's got his todger in a box?"

Alex shot him a filthy look. "No, you ass. Because it's almost bleeding _Halloween_. The one-year anniversary of the day He fell? Of the day—"

"—Snape lost his Mark," Fiona finished.

Myron made an exaggerated 'Ooh' sound of understanding as Amy continued to puff.

Alex looked at all three of her companions in disgust. "They don't lose them, you idiots, they just fade."

"Uh-huh," said Myron, who clearly didn't believe that Alex knew what she was talking about. "You think they're really going to cancel the Hogsmeade visit on Halloween, like everybody keeps saying? And don't hog that, Amy" he, said, reaching for the joint.

Amy coughed, passed it, and looked down at her roly-poly picture. It looked like a lima bean with five legs sticking arthritically from either side.

Meanwhile, Alex was still talking about Halloween. "They're not cancelling it, though there's hardly a point in going, what with all the shops closed and half the Castle off at the Potter Memorial unveiling," she said, and began counting off half the Castle on her fingers. "All the Bones girls are going, that Weasley kid, the metamorphogus from Hufflepuff…"

"Why? What's she got to do with it? Her family name—Tonks, right?—I don't even recognize it," said Fiona.

"Oh, you didn't know?" said Alex, looking suddenly very smug to know a secret.

"Know what?" interjected Amy.

"That she's Andromeda Black's half-blood bastard. 'Tonks' is the _Muggle's_ name."

Fiona put her hand over her mouth. "That's _horrible._ I heard my Mum talking about that _ages_ ago. She thinks the Muggle bewitched Black, or gave her a love potion or something. Can you _imagine?_ "

"I can't imagine letting a filthy Mudblood get close enough to me to slip me a love potion in the first place, no," said Alex scornfully. "She should've known better. She deserves whatever she got for being so stupid."

"I think I'd just _kill_ myself," said Fiona, her hands flailing dramatically before her. "I mean, who would want you, after that?

"Right? I wouldn't fuck a Mudblood's sloppy seconds with _Myron's_ dick," said Alex.

"Eww," said Fiona.

Myron was the only person in the group who didn't look completely disgusted. "Alex is obsessed with my todger," he told Amy conversationally. "Has been for years."

"Yeah, you wish," said Alex.

"I told her I'm saving myself for marriage," Myron continued, unperturbed.

"Ha!"

He turned to Alex and said, innocently, "Maybe Dumbledore will let you borrow Snape's. I hear he keeps it in a box."

Even Amy managed to laugh at that one. They're clever, her Housemates. Slytherin chose his students for the seeds of greatness in them, after all.

Then she gave her roly-poly little x's for eyes and drew a cemetery around it. She scribbled a cheap headstone with a cautionary tale for the epitaph, something the little roly-poly mummies could point out to their little roly-poly babies and warn, in grave whispers, against short skirts and underage drinking and walking alone after dark:

**Here Lies Amelia T. Scrivener.**

**A Mudblood's Sloppy Seconds.**

**Eww.**

Then she crumpled up the page and shoved it in her pocket because it's not as though she's all fucked up about the whole thing or anything like that. She was too high to remember what was on the parchment when she discovered it in her pocket on the way back to the Castle after class, and too high to care that it bounced off the rim of the waste bin when she tried to throw it away.

Very unfortunately for her, Professor Kettleburn discovered it on the ground during his lunch hour. Extremely irritated and determined to identify the litterbug, he picked it up, unfurled it, and began to read.

* * *

The crumpled-up bit of parchment lay in the center of Professor Snape's overburdened desk, Exhibit A in the Case of the Fucked-Up Teenage Girl. The words leapt out starkly, crass and too-visible from where Amy stood three feet away:

**Here Lies Amelia T. Scrivener.**

**A Mudblood's Sloppy Seconds.**

**Eww.**

It might have been funny if it hadn't been so fucking horrible. Amy wished she were back in the dorms again, re-reading _Bartleby_ and letting Alex practice stupid glamours on her hair. Even being Alex's guinea pig for new beauty charms was preferable to this.

Snape considered her drawing for a moment in exaggerated silence, looked up at Amy, and frowned. "Do you know what I spent my weekend doing, Miss Scrivener?" he asked.

Judging by the amount of paperwork on Snape's desk, she guessed he hadn't spent it marking essays. Either that or he simply hadn't been given a T.A. to help with the grading. Amy wondered if this was supposed to be academia's version of a freshman hazing, because, come on, even _Binns_ had a T.A.

Jesus, how humiliating.

Between Amy's drawing and the endless piles of grading sat several unnaturally tidy stacks of those Ministry pamphlets people are always trying to distribute to teenagers. They were still bound with twine, as though they'd just been dropped off and Snape hadn't had a chance to throw them away, yet. _Don't Drink and Dissapparate!_ one of them warned. A vapid-looking witch on another winked at Amy and pointed to her title: _Sex Can Wait, Set a Date!_

At the very corner of the desk, as though placed there in some fit of irony just to make the fact that Severus Snape was supposed to be a teacher look even more ridiculous, was an apple. It was difficult to imagine Snape eating something as normal as an apple, let alone receiving one from an adoring first-year. When he showed up at meals at all, he never ate. He just sort of sat there, looking dyspeptic.

He looked fairly dyspeptic, now, as he sat behind his desk with all this unwanted responsibility before him. His thin lips clasped together unpleasantly, as though the very sight of his student standing in front of him like a criminal, like an idiot, turned his stomach. The lines of his sallow face seemed to deepen as he stared. Sometimes it was hard to believe he was only twenty-three.

Or was it twenty-two?

"That wasn't a rhetorical question, Miss Scrivener. Do you know what I spent my weekend doing?" he repeated.

"No, Sir. I don't."

"I," Snape began, crumpling up her drawing and tossing it in the rubbish bin, "spent what little leisure time is afforded to me at a staff meeting, during which we discussed the importance of learning _with_ the student." He fixed her with a dangerous, penetrating glare. "Learn with me, Scrivener."

The vapid-looking witch on the abstinence pamphlet smiled broadly up at Amy. She pointed to her title again, which now read, _True Love Waits!_

"First," Snape spat, "One is to _lead_ the student. That is where I ask a question and pray that your perilously short attention span allows you, eventually, to make the relevant inferences." He began tracing his lips with one long, pale finger. Then, abruptly, he said, "What are you?"

It was a trap. A trick question. She had absolutely no idea how to even begin to answer. "Er..."

"Your _House_ , girl. It's hardly Arithmancy."

"Slytherin, she said, "I'm a Slytherin."

"Wrong already, Scrivener," he answered drily. "You are not _a_ Slytherin. You are _my_ Slytherin."

His Slytherin. He should shrink her down and stick her in a jar full of Preserving Solution.

"Which means," he continued, "that when you refuse to attend class, generally neglect to do anything that is expected of you, and leave neurotic little drawings out for anyone to see, it reflects badly on me. Worse, my _colleagues—"_ he spat the word as if it were the crassest oath "—who, for some unfathomable reason, seem to be under the impression that I care about such things, harass me about it when I have far more important things to attend."

She wondered, vaguely, what those "more important things" were that he would rather be attending.

"Step two: _observe_ the student. This is where I attempt to ascertain whether or not anything I've said has penetrated that fog of malaise or whatever it is addling your brain. Well, Miss Scrivener, has it?" he continued.

"Yes," she lied.

"Yes, what?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Another educational success," he spat sarcastically. "Step three: _validate_ the student. This is where I find that I have absolutely nothing positive to say about you except that I'm sure you'll make a fine professional mourner when you are forced to take up work following your failure to graduate, and we move on to that happy final step: _evaluate_ the student."

Wait.

Lead the student... Observe the student... Validate...

"L.O.V.E.? _Love_ the student?" she blurted out. "Jesus, is that intentional?"

"Is the room not positively caked with appropriately professional teacherly affection?" he asked, making a grand gesture at the dungeon walls and, failing to find the evidence 'caked' there, sighed. "Ah. What a failure I am."

Look at them, Miss Scrivener, look at all the fucks I don't give.

"But we're not done here," Snape continued. "So, for evaluation's sake, I ask again: What are you?"

He didn't mean...He couldn't _possibly_ mean...

Snape cleared his throat expectantly.

Oh. Oh, he did.

The pride she used to have tingled, like a phantom limb, as she said the words, "I am your Slytherin."

Snape nodded in agreement. "And as _my_ Slytherin, it should be clear that your obligations are not optional. I do not wait around for your amusement or your fancy. The Ministry did not politely request you attend classes at your leisure, and I have no idea what infantile delusion led you to believe that you may simply opt out of your detentions, your classes, and your various responsibilities, but it will never happen again, will it?"

"No, Sir."

"You will begin regularly attending every class on your singularly useless schedule. You will submit your senior exit strategy for review. You will be present at each and every one of your scheduled detentions. And, finally, you will generally behave in a way that is fitting for a member of my House _—_ is that clear?"

"Yes, Sir."

Amy teetered awkwardly on her heels and stared at the Ministry abstinence advocate on the pamphlet again while Snape continued to talk. The words, _Take The Purity Pledge!_ flashed at her in neon purple. She wondered who thought of these stupid slogans, and how much that person got paid.

Amy was still thinking about this when Snape stopped suddenly, mid-sentence, his eyes trained on her head as though she wore a massive pile of dragon shit for a hat and he'd somehow not noticed until that very moment.

"What—what the devil is that in your hair, girl?!" he suddenly demanded.

Her...Hair?

Amy reached back, arm bent at an awkward angle, and touched the delicate architecture of Alex's latest experiment in charm work. Something that was definitely not a braid crinkled under her fingers.

"Is that a bit of refuse fashioned into some sort of...ornament?" His lip curled when he said it.

Knowing Alex, it was probably an empty bag of crisps folded to look like a bow. Couldn't he say anything that sounded straight-forward? She tugged at the bag-bow, but it did not budge.

"Yeah, I guess so," she agreed unhappily. And then, after a second ticked by, added, "Sir."

And the look on his face. Like he thought she was completely insane. Like her very existence was not only ridiculous, but somehow outrageous. Snape then pinched the bridge of his nose, eyes tightly shut against what must have been a gale-forced migraine bashing at the insides of his skull. Because Amy is a positive harbinger of headaches, and if she had any decency at all she'd jump off the astronomy tower and save him the trouble of dealing with her.

It took a minute, but Snape did, eventually, move his hand from his face and look back at her with a scowl. "I'm dropping you from Potions," he declared.

Amy could think of nothing more profound to say than, "Oh."

His response was to point dramatically at a vile-smelling barrel in the back of the classroom. "Sort. Now. No magic."

So Amy shuffled slowly toward the back of the classroom, noting with no small measure of relief that Snape had been generous enough to leave a pair of tongs on the table next to the barrel, and there they were.

An entire bucket of horned toads massacred in formaldehyde _. Mortified_ in red Preserving Solution, their normally resilient skin soft and slimy; their fish-white bellies exposed for all the world to scrutinize. The corpse nearest to her was dappled gently with mold; unfit, even, for some first-year's use in a sub-par potion. Amy picked up the tongs and reached for it, this thing that had once been alive.

The tongs hesitated in the air.

How was that even possible? How was it even conceivable, by the wildest stretch of the imagination, that this had once been a living, breathing thing with a heart and a soul? With a scurrying little desert life that was, to it, at least, precious? Now it just lay there, its little eyes all slack with death, half-open and staring at through graveyard cataracts at nothing. It was cold and humiliated, reduced to some disgusting—

The tongs recoiled as if suddenly nauseated with a mad idea.

It wasn't just disgusting, it was... it was profane. Somehow horrific beyond comprehension that this bucket even existed; a breach of some nameless principle of decency older than language itself that this wretched necropolis sat before her. How pitiful they were, just floating there like weird, bloated little organs in a bloody soup. Like coils of intestine and bits of liver and it reminded her of…

It reminded her of…

The tongs lowered to her side.

Somebody, somewhere a million miles away, spoke: "Is there a problem, Miss Scrivener?"

"I'm not doing this," Amy said, and, _Jesus,_ did those words really just come out of her mouth?

Snape was still seated at his desk across the room. She refused to look back.

"Excuse me?" It was laced with warning. Danger, Will Robinson, there's an evil, greasy bat behind you and he wants nothing more than to watch you fall apart by the seams of your own neurotic aversion.

"I… _can't_ ," she said. Because she couldn't. She really just couldn't. Finally, she turned around.

Slowly, with anal-retentive deliberation, Snape set down his quill. "I think," he began quietly, every syllable wrapped in its own special threat, "you'll find that you _can,_ that you _will,_ and that, in fact, you _must._ Now, would you like to reframe your thinking on this?"

Amy looked at the bucket again. Then at Snape. Then at her shoe. "I…ah— " she cast wildly around for the right words; something polite; something demure; something that would just make this all go away. The only thing that came to mind was the line from that book she'd been re-reading, the one Slughorn had given her: "—I'd prefer not to, no."

For a moment there was only the sound of water dripping somewhere; of civilizations of mold rising and falling in the dampest, darkest, most disgusting corner of the dungeons.

Drip.

Drip.

"You'd…prefer not to," Snape finally repeated slowly. His hands were steepled before him, folded as if in prayer.

What else could she do? She said, "Right. I'd prefer not to."

Snape simply sat there silently for a moment, looking as though someone had tried to force-feed him poison.

Drip.

Drip.

He seemed to be swelling imperceptibly, the way Pandora's Box must have before that curious idiot came by and opened it up.

Drip.

Drip.

Oh. Oh, that had been a mistake.

"And just who the _fuck—_ " here, he punctuated the expletive by bringing his hand down on the desk with a _bang_ , causing several unmarked essays to flutter to the floor "—who in the ever-loving _fuck_ do you think you are, Scrivener, that you'd 'prefer not to'? Shall I christen you 'Bartleby'?!"

 _Bartleby_?

As in _Bartleby the Scrivener_?

Something popped in the place where Amy's brain was supposed to be. She had to smack her hand over her mouth to kill the hysterical giggle. Because how utterly, completely ridiculous had her life become that there she was, standing with a bow made out of a bag of crisps and a pair of tongs, and she and her childhood god are arguing about the stupidest task in the world—something that could be achieved in half a second by magic—and it turns out that Snape _does_ read.

Not only did he read, he was apparently capable of making a heat-of-the-moment literary reference.

To _Bartleby the Scrivener_ by Herman Melville, the book she'd read over the summer, the one she was re-reading now. The one about the law clerk who "preferred not to" do anything at all. That Severus Snape of all people had also read it, that he'd made the connection to her surname, attitude, and words, was shocking to the point of absurdity.

Snape was out of his chair now, giving her that look again, like she was completely insane. He was saying something, his mouth opening and closing and making noises and doing whatever else it is that mouths do when people try to communicate, but the meaning was lost.

"Please," she said. God, look at her, reduced to begging. "What if I grade papers or something, instead? Slughorn used to let me do that, when I was his T.A."

"Scriv—"

"They're going to be terrible," she insisted over him, her voice rising in pitch. "It's the Spellchecking Quills. They're single-handedly responsible for the decline of the English language. People-"

"Sto—"

"Nay, decline of Western civilization itself!" she said, suddenly eloquent in her hysteria. An English teacher's staffroom breakdown, right out of her mouth.

He began walking toward her. _Stalking_ toward her, really. _Storming_ toward her. And— _Merlin_ —If she thought he was angry before, this was something much, much worse.

"Nobody will have bothered to proofread!" Amy could see herself acting like a complete fool, like somebody's disturbed teenage daughter, standing there babbling about Spellchecking Quills with trash in her hair, the tongs flailing ridiculously in her hand, but there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. It was like an out-of-body experience.

"Silen—"

"They don't catch homophones," she practically screeched. "Next thing you know, you'll be reading about 'strait' stirring rods instead of 'straight' ones. You know, S-T-R-A-I-T? Like the Bering Strai _—_ "

"Stop!" Snape was in front of her now, and not only was he actually _shouting,_ he seemed poised to cross that mandatory three-foot chasm of personal space as easily as he might side-step a puddle.

Amy backed into a table adjacent to the bucket of blood. Somehow, absurdly, the tongs were brandished before her like a ludicrous sword, as though she could use them to fend him off. The look on his face, she knew better than to say anything. She pressed her lips together, lest any stray bit of nonsense come tumbling out.

Snape stepped into her space, his hand— _what the hell is he doing_?!—reaching out. But all he did was clamp those unnaturally long, pale fingers of his around her wrist. Hard. The other hand snatched the tongs from her grasp before letting her go.

"I can only come to two conclusions regarding your behavior." He practically whispered it.

"First," he began, placing the hand with the tongs on the edge of the desk some four inches left of her hip. "First, you have either finally lost your already tenuous grasp on reality."

"Exactly," she agreed breathlessly. It just fell unbidden from her mouth. "I'm mad. You can't make a madwoman—"

"Or," he interrupted, now placing the other hand some four inches right of her hip, effectively caging her with his arms, "you believe that your... _ordeal_ somehow makes you above other, lesser mortals and their rules."

She could feel the heat bleeding off of his thin frame and opened her mouth to say...something. Anything.

He leaned in, so, so, so, unbelievably close. Menacingly close. Close enough for her to _feel_ his breath on her face. "The next words out of your mouth had better be a request for last rites. Tell me now to which god you pray, because, _Bartleby,_ if you do not calm yourself immediately and find that you _do_ , in fact, _prefer_ to proceed with your detention, I may not be responsible for my actions," he hissed. He was trying to physically frighten her into submission. And it had been working, too.

Until she smelled the alcohol on his breath.

Snape's mouth positively reeked of that same juniper-y, antiseptic scent she'd caught the last time she'd been in his office, when he'd spiked his tea with that potion from the battered flask. Except it wasn't potion at all, she realized now. It was gin.

Just gin.

It should have frightened her. Hell, it should have _terrified_ her, because here was this angry young man violating her personal space, his mouth a snarl of crooked teeth, his eyes positively soulless in their depth. This rumored Death Eater. This probable murderer. Her professor. Her Head of House.

But Amy wasn't terrified. She was eleven years old again, staring reverently at Snape from across the common room as he and the other gods drank firewhiskey and laughed and told jokes that would make you go redder than the Hogwarts Express. She was giddy for the day that the Dark Lord would give them more power than you'd ever dreamed of having. He would fight for them, they said, fight to get rid of all the Mudbloods and Muggle-lovers and trash that threatened their way of life. Only eleven, and the one thing in the world better than Glamouring your hair green was knowing, with all a child's conviction, that everything was going to be okay.

And then she was seventeen again. Only seventeen and standing there with all the hopelessness of the damned because the revolutionaries were all charlatans and the professors were drunks and nothing had turned out okay, after all.

"Well?!" Snape demanded, his breath mingling horrifically with the formaldehyde stench of the toads.

It hit her out of nowhere, like a sharp blow to the back of the head. There was this emptiness ballooning in her throat, a sickening lurch in her gut as her organs churned and the contents of her stomach struggled to defy gravity. Her hand slapped to her mouth in an effort to keep the broken pieces of herself inside where they belonged.

Snape jerked backward, retreating to his side of that three-foot chasm, just in time. She doubled over with an audible retch, one hand wrapped around her stomach and the other catching the half-masticated pieces of dinner that blossomed, as unwanted and unloved as the bloody chunks of an abortion, into the world.

"Oh, for God's sake— _Scorgify!_ "

Some neuron misfired in her brain, then, and she inexplicably remembered that thing Myron had once told her.

"He's dead," she gasped, gagging on her own vile effluence, "God is dead."

There was a single moment of intense regret and abject fear in the space where her heart skipped a beat. Because Snape really did look like he was about to murder her. His lip curled back as he drew away and he even raised the tongs.

They made a sickly splash as they hit the surface layer of horned toads still sitting in the bucket.

Snape whirled away in a dramatic flurry of robes. Undoubtedly to stop himself from committing grievous bodily harm. He threw himself behind his desk, pulled out the familiar flask of alcohol, and she saw something strange written in the lines of his face. He looked exactly as she felt. Like he'd rather be anywhere else in the world than sitting right there in that subterranean prison with these piles of unwanted responsibility and fucked-up teenage girls stacked all around him.

Like he'd rather be dead.

She imagined only the thought of coming back as a ghost and having to repeat this charade without the benefit of alcohol kept him from killing himself.

When he noticed that she was still there, he called her 'Bartleby' again and told her to get the fuck out of his sight.

She did.

Later, when she has calmed down a bit, she will climb into her too-small bed and think about it for a while. She'll rub her wrist where the tingling ghost of Snape's hand still haunts her and just mull the whole thing over. She'll listen to the lake undulate beyond the window and decide that she'd been wrong.

Some Mad Man said that God was dead, but that wasn't quite right.

He was merely dethroned, the broken remnants of His kingdom strewn about Him like so many frog guts.


	4. Welcome to Hell

"Bartleby, go away."

It was always strange to hear Professor Snape use her nickname. Chiefly, of course, because he just didn't seem like a nickname kind of person. But it was also the name itself—there is something babyish and undignified about most English words that end with a long 'ee' sound. Baby. Crazy. Lazy. Snape almost never used such diction. He spoke in vaguely sepulchral tones and chose words that seemed ripped from a thesaurus. Infant. Insane. Indolent.

Anyway, the nickname was odd.

"I am neither your savior nor your guardian. I haven't the slightest inclination to act out whatever role your adolescent fantasies have assigned for me. Kindly remove me from the white horse and go away."

And so damn verbose, too. Amy could swear Snape must have a secret fetish for hearing himself talk. Which was also strange, because people who love to hear themselves talk are usually too self-absorbed to be very perceptive. And he was. Perceptive, that is. How else could he manage to insult so thoroughly, if not by reading your insecurities as if they were written right there on your face?

"Ten points from Slytherin."

That snapped her out of her dumbness. "From your own House?"

"Twenty points. Go. Away."

She didn't really know what she was doing here lingering gloomily outside Snape's private quarters on Halloween, the one-year anniversary of the day he lost his Mark and she her certainty. Maybe she really was just a lost little girl whose adolescent fantasies had unfairly made him into a savior. Maybe it was just that she saw something in him—something desolate and bankrupt that called to her own emptiness.

In her defense, though, she wasn't going to knock. Really, she wasn't, because that would be tantamount to a death wish. It was Snape who came out with his eerie perception and told her to go away.

It was also he who pulled her inside a moment later.

Because Peeves was coming, his usual childish mudslinging preceding him. Already he was singing;

_Wee Potty's won!_

_Voldy's done!_

_Now it's time to_

_Have some fun!_

The last thing either of them needed, she supposed, was to give Peeves something else to sing about. The whole school would be awash in sordid speculation had he seen them standing there on the threshold of Snape's private quarters.

Her professor asked what she wanted from him, but she didn't know. It wasn't his touch, not yet, anyway. The way his hand had curled around her upper arm to drag her inside wasn't exactly violent, but it wasn't wholly welcome, either. Much like his presence at the school. She didn't think he belonged there. He was too young and too angry and he was an awful gin-guzzling excuse for a teacher. It made her miss Slughorn.

Snape asked her again what the _fuck_ she was doing there, and his use of the expletive only confirmed her suspicions that he didn't belong. Teachers don't curse, after all.

Perhaps that's what made her bold, the idea that he wasn't welcome and didn't belong. Maybe it was that she felt she didn't belong. But she wasn't about to analyze the thing to a bloody pulp, so she just shoved her hands in her pockets, relatively unruffled in the face of his ire, looked around his sitting room, and said, "You have a lot of books."

The stupid statement of fact literally took him back (he'd again been standing too close again in an attempt to intimidate).

"Indeed. How perceptive," he sneered.

"Are they all about Potions?"

Snape didn't answer because he wasn't so easily distracted, but he did give up. He looked at her very strangely, like she was something supremely disgusting but also vaguely puzzling picked in a jar, sat down in an armchair, and Summoned a glass of firewhiskey without using his wand. She wondered how he did that.

"What are you even still doing here? At Hogwarts?" he said. "Shouldn't you be in Hogsmeade with your pissant little Housemates, enjoying this day of celebration in its totality?"

'In its totality.' Who says that?

"It's a condition of my probation," she said. "I can't leave without a chaperone. I thought you knew." She thought all the professors knew that. Apparently not.

"I sincerely hope you're not expecting some sort of life advice."

"I'm not."

A particularly interesting-looking red book on his bookshelf attracted her. She walked over and admired it with her eyes and not her hands. The title was in Latin. She wondered when Snape the Death Eater had found the time to get so intensely educated.

Snape the Professor sipped at his drink and ignored her.

"I'm sure Peeves is gone, now. Sorry for bothering you, Professor," she said, and saw herself out.

* * *

The second time she lingered, he let her in without saying anything.

When she thought about it years later, she liked to think that Severus Snape had suffered her presence not because he pitied her, but because he'd been lonely. Not forlorn, wounded Byronic antihero lonely, more like 'no man is an island' lonely. He didn't seem to be on speaking terms with any of the staff and obviously hated his job.

It was one of those ridiculously picturesque afternoons in mid-November, with the dying sun casting a pink light over a Forbidden Forest so saturated with orange and red foliage that it seemed to be on fire. Not that you could see that down here in the dungeons. Still, she noticed that his sitting room did have a somewhat nice lake-window, like the ones in her own dormitory. It threw a murky green light into the room that did absolutely nothing for Snape's pallor, but it was rather interesting to watch tentacle-shaped shadows float by.

It was the only nice feature of his quarters, that window. The whole place struck her as far too modest for the likes of Salazar Slytherin, and it seemed ridiculous that the man, a legend even when he was alive, would have lived here. Could his greatness—or his ego, if you prefer—have even fit in this tiny sitting room? Where was the enchanted ceiling? The towering stone pillars? The serpentine woodwork? So much of the Castle was decorative to the point of ostentatiousness, but this place just looked like a cell for a poverty-stricken academic.

There were four walls, two doors, and the window. One door led out to the corridor and the other, she supposed, to his—her stomach gave a funny lurch at the thought— _bedroom._ There was a bookshelf, a hearth, a utilitarian table and chair. Clustered in the middle of the room, a battered sofa and armchair faced each other as if in confidence. It was surprisingly untidy, with broken quills and crumpled-up bits of parchment and overdue grading strewn about.

Somehow, Amy couldn't quite muster the energy to really disapprove. She also didn't refuse when Snape placed a tumbler in her hand. She wondered why he would do this.

"Because _my_ drinking isn't making _you_ any less depressing, so I've a mind to try and medicate the thing at its source" he replied rather nastily.

She hadn't realized she'd said it aloud.

"Sorry," she said. She downed the alcohol in one shot, having no idea how he managed to sip at the nasty stuff, and almost immediately felt a little better. "What would you be if you could be anything in the world?" she asked suddenly, still staring into the depths of the lake.

"What a ridiculous question," Snape observed from somewhere behind her.

She ignored this. "I wouldn't mind being a fish." The fish in the lake reminded her of the things preserved in Snape's office, of the toads dead in the bucket, only that the fish could swim away if they didn't want to be looked at.

He scoffed. "And here I was under the impression that all little girls aspired to be princesses."

"Didn't you want to be a prince? Isn't that what they used to call you?" she said, suddenly recalling that Snape once had a nickname, too. She turned around to face him and found him standing closer than she'd expected, an odd and stiff look on his face.

A bitter kind of expression possessed his features as he scowled past her and said, almost as if to himself, "I never should have accepted this position."

"Why did you?"

"You might say it's a condition of my probation, Bartleby." The corner of his lip twitched and curled up into a wry kind of smile that didn't really improve his features at all, as if he enjoyed throwing her own words back at her.

"Maybe it'll get better once my class graduates in the spring. Then there'll be no-one left who remembers you as a student." She realized as she said it that it wasn't true, that all of the other professors would still remember teaching him. The thought was disheartening.

Apparently lacking any witty comeback, he sighed. It seemed to her that there were eons in that sigh—years of suffering and disappointment and failure all wrapped up in one barely-audible exhalation. It must have been true, then, what they said about him being a Death Eater and a traitor. Maybe it was also true what they said about Dumbledore keeping his todger in a box.

That's when she kissed him. It was an experiment, really, a light drag of dry lip against dry lip, just to see if it did anything for her. It didn't. She didn't feel her stomach swoop or her heart flutter. The world didn't stand still or narrow until nothing else mattered. She wasn't even mildly turned-on. There was nothing. Absolutely nothing but dry lip stuttering against dry lip.

Jesus Christ, she was even depressing herself.

Probably the worst part was that she couldn't even manage to make him angry. She'd have bet all the gold in Gringotts such an action would result in either an apoplectic fit of rage or, less likely, some seriously passionate shagging. He, however, just walked away from her with a moderately revolted expression and poured himself more alcohol. No suicide by Snape for her.

"Congratulations, Bartleby. I wouldn't have thought it possible, but you've just brought about the death of every lascivious teacher-student fantasy in the wizarding world. How the collective male libido mourns."

That bad, huh? How embarrassing.

"I should go," she said.

Snape threw himself onto a sofa, somehow managing not to spill his drink in the process, and pinched the bridge of his nose as if fighting off a headache. Probably from all the whiskey. Bloody alcoholic.

"Come here, Bartleby," he growled, sounding rather exasperated and put-upon.

Well, that was unexpected. Amy hesitated.

"It would involve a great deal of tedious paperwork if this were the last place you were seen before throwing yourself off the astronomy tower. Come." He moved his hand away from his face and scowled at her in a way that reminded her of the warning look he gave students in class.

She complied rather cautiously, looked at the spot next to him on the couch, and decided to sit on the floor at his feet instead.

The young professor handed his drink down to her and, in a gesture that seemed disturbingly out of character, reached a pale hand down to absently stroke her hair once or twice. His touch was pleasantly warm, which surprised her for some reason, and just barely this side of intimate, which didn't. The action gave her the rather ridiculous impression of being some kind of lap dog. Demoralizing, but also maybe vaguely comforting.

"Welcome," he said, all silk and sarcasm, "To hell."

Is that what this was? Was this hell? She wondered how he knew that and why he seemed to be right there with her.

This was around the time she noticed the empty bottles of whiskey shoved under his armchair and pondered what sort of girl would put herself in this position.

* * *

"Myron, is Amy copying pages from the _Magical Language Association Handbook for Editors_?"

"Yes, Alex, she is."

"Did she lose a bet?"

"No."

"Has she been cursed?"

"No, I don't think so."

"Then _why,_ Myron, _why_ is Amy copying pages from the _Magical Language Association Handbook for Editors_?"

"Snape," Myron said simply.

"He's _making_ her do that?"

"Yes."

"How many pages has she done?"

"Looks like she's almost a third of the way through the book."

"What's that even like?"

"I don't know. Amy, what's it like, copying pages from the _Magical Language Association Handbook for Editors_?"

Amy looked up from her section on semi-autonomous quills, then looked down again because Alex was sprawled across the couch with her legs over Myron's lap. Her skirt had ridden up immodestly where she had a bottle of firewhiskey shoved between her thighs like a giant glass erection, and Myron seemed to be idly pushing his index finger in and out of the bottle's opening. Neither one of them had the decency to look the least bit embarrassed by this, but were absolutely comfortable fawning all over each other like normal people apparently do all the time.

"Well?" Myron prompted.

Amy considered, her face buried in the editing book. "Have you ever read the back of a shampoo bottle?" she finally asked.

"Um…sure?" said Myron.

"It's like doing that over, and over, and over again."

Alex dislodged the bottle from her thighs and took a swig. "That's, ah, that's pretty fucked-up, Amy."

Let her tell you about the time she read the back of the shampoo bottle.

She was in France at the time—remember, her parents took her on vacation there, after it happened—thinking about killing herself. She was standing in the shower, letting the hot spray of water that beat against her shoulders go cold because the very idea of actually using soap seemed somehow exhausting beyond reason, when her mother knocked on the door to check on her.

Amy assured her mother she wasn't dead, forced herself to pick up the shampoo bottle, and, putting off the monumental task of lathering soap through her hair, read the back.

She doesn't remember what it said. It said the sorts of things shampoo bottles say. Just one long advertisement that became irrelevant the moment her mum bought the product. Promises of sleeker tips, healthier roots, a better life. Sentences without subjects. Not tested on animals. May cause eye irritation.

Single-word commands: Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

But for fifteen glorious seconds, Amy wasn't present in the life she hated. Neither was she living someone else's fiction. She was just…nowhere. Suspended. A sentence without a subject.

Not tested on animals.

May cause eye irritation.

She read it again. And again. And again.

Lather.

Rinse.

Repeat.

That's exactly what copying pages from the book was like. A sort of soap for the brain. She doubted that Snape knew this. It was much more likely he'd simply dreamed up the horribly tedious task as poetic retribution for her little grammatical breakdown. She was still being punished; it's just that this way he didn't have to subject himself to the possibility of her vomiting all over the place again.

"You know, Amy, you get detention so much, one would almost think you enjoyed it," Alex teased.

Ridiculous. What kind of sick, fucked-up person would actually _want_ to spend time with Snape?

What kind of person would kiss him?

"Have you started on that Charms essay?" Myron asked, interrupting Amy's train of thought. "It's due on Monday."

"I'm working on it," Amy lied.

" _I'm_ writing mine on Secrecy Magic—you know, like the Fidelius Charm, Anonymity Curse, and Non-Disclosure Enchantment. Only got three inches left, too."

Amy looked up. "Non-Disclosure Enchantment? That sounds familiar."

Both he and Alex tittered drunkenly at her.

"Well it _would,_ wouldn't it? Flitwick's been talking about them all week, or do you just think about the shampoo bottle when he lectures?" Myron teased.

Ridiculous. Of course not. Just like she certainly didn't read the back of her ink bottle instead of listening, either. Did it say that ingestion of this product may result in spontaneous combustion, and that Scrivenshaft & Sons Ink Company cannot be held liable? How would she know? She's never read the fine print.

"I'm arguing that Non-Disclosure Enchantments differ from other forms of Secrecy Spells because they don't cover intent, and can be gotten around by—" Myron began.

" _Merlin_ , shut up, you swot. Nobody cares," Alex interrupted.

He scoffed. "Philistines, the both of you. You never know when something like that could be important—I need a drink just to sit here," Myron said, reaching for the bottle.

Alex made a show of holding it just out of his reach. "Oh, _this_? You want _this_?" she asked innocently.

"I'll just—go ahead—and—take that." Myron bent to reach for the bottle, and Alex kept teasing it just out of his reach, giggling the whole while, until he was practically laying on top of her on the couch.

"Why don't you tell us a joke, Alex?" Amy said loudly.

Alex let Myron pluck the bottle from her hand and sat up a bit while they dislodged their limbs from one another.

"I know a great one—A vampire walks into a bar."

"Heard it," said Myron and Amy together.

Alex pouted for a minute, screwed up her face in intoxicated consideration, then smiled deviously. "So a bloke says to me he had his first sexual experience at Hogwarts," she began.

"Did he?" asked Myron.

She nodded. "Sure did. Fucked little Mary Barton behind the greenhouses, and do you know what she said to him?"

"What did she say to him?"

"She said: 'Well, you're better at shagging than teaching Herbology.'"

Myron laughed a full-throated, rich series of _ha's!_ He had a nice voice.

Alex held up her hand to stop him. "How is spinach like a Mudblood's dick?"

"I don't know Alex, how _is_ spinach like a Mudblood's dick?" Myron asked.

"If you're forced to eat it as a kid, you'll never enjoy it as an adult."

"Merlin, where do you even pick this stuff up?" Myron asked after he'd finished laughing.

"My uncle Augie," Alex replied fondly.

"You should ask him for new material over the holidays," Amy teased. The holidays were still two weeks away, but they couldn't come fast enough for her. Amy looked up and was surprised to find that Alex's expression instantly soured, all traces of amusement gone from her face. Myron wasn't smiling either, but looking pointedly—and angrily—at Amy.

"I'd love to, but they don't allow Christmas visits to Azkaban last time I checked," Alex snarled.

Of course. Uncle Augie as in Uncle Augustus. As in Augustus Rookwood, who was currently serving a life sentence in Azkaban for crimes committed in the service of the Dark Lord. It was hard to keep track of whose family members were dead, or in Azkaban, or simply missing and presumed to be rotting in an unmarked grave.

"I'm so sorry…I…I forgot," Amy said lamely.

"Must be nice," Alex sneered back. It was almost Snape-worthy in its scorn.

Amy closed her mouth, then opened it again to apologize more.

But Alex just waved her off irritably. "Whatever. It doesn't matter."

Myron, ever the peacemaker, offered Alex the bottle again, but she waved that off, too.

"Nah, I'll have all the firewhiskey I can drink soon enough," she said.

"Planning on robbing a pub, are you?" Myron teased.

Alex merely smiled enigmatically.

* * *

Amy dreamt.

She dreamt of that first Potions class with Snape, the one from over a year ago, now, when she learned that her childhood god couldn't lecture worth a damn, never remembered anyone's name, and certainly would not start a Snape Club where you got to eat lovely stuffed pheasant and meet famous people. Only, what she dreamed wasn't at all what happened.

Snape's classroom was in disarray.

Several 4th-year boys were chasing a 4th-year girl around with Memoriballs in their hands, giggling and imploring her to watch it. The girl bumped into a table as she ran from them, knocking somebody's potion to the floor, where it hissed and began eating away the soles of the other students' shoes.

"Professor!" cried a swotty Ravenclaw from the back, his hand thrust high in the air. "Professor! It clearly says in _Advanced Charms_ that the Non-Disclosur—"

But whatever it was the book said, she never did learn. Amy was too distracted by Myron and Alex, who were noisily sucking each other's faces close to the front of the classroom.

"You've got to see this!" the boys were yelling at the giggling girl again. "It's _disgusting_!"

Snape wasn't even trying to control his classroom. He leaned against his desk, arms crossed over his wiry torso, apparently blind to everything but Amy, whom he stared at. As their eyes met, his jaw did this thing where it clenched and he looked just livid as hell. From her spot in the front row, she could see a muscle twitching painfully in his temple, partially visible through a curtain of greasy black hair.

"Professor! _Professor_!" cried the Ravenclaw, now desperately waving his hand in the air.

"Oh, Myron!" moaned Alex in rapture.

The 4th-year girl knocked another cauldron to the floor with a bang, and the students in the back began standing on their chairs to save their feet.

"Well?" Snape asked as the chaos swirled all around them, his lip curling with contempt.

"I—Sir?" Amy responded.

"Well, are you going to sit there for another seven years like a feckless idiot, or do you plan on doing something about it?"

"About...what?"

"Get up here," he commanded.

Amy got out of her chair, stepped over a puddle of noxious-smelling liquid that represented the mingled product of the two spilled cauldrons, and crossed over to him.

Snape caught her chin between thumb and forefinger, his touch raising goosebumps all over her skin, and this time, when they kissed, she _did_ feel something.

The world _did_ come to a standstill—Myron and Alex ceased fumbling with one another, the 4th-years fell silent, the Ravenclaw quit trying to get Snape's attention. Even the ruined potion coating the dungeon floor stopped its corrosive hissing.

There was nothing. Absolutely nothing but the feeling of Snape's lips gliding smoothly across her own; the taste of his mouth, hot and juniper-y with gin; the sound of her own moan vibrating against his lips and shooting straight to the space between her trembling thighs.

She felt his one of his hands tighten its grip on her chin suddenly, while the other caressed her thigh and then insinuated itself between her legs. She gasped, weak-kneed, as he slid his fingers under her knickers like a thief in the night and pressed them _there._ His thumb swirled around her clit as two fingers played at her entrance and slicked so easily—so very easily—inside her, and—no, no, _no_ —this was suddenly happening too fast, and the classroom around them erupted in chaos again as Snape abruptly and violently shoved her to the floor.

"On your knees," he snarled as he began unfastening his belt.

" _Professor_!" screeched the Ravenclaw from the back of the room as the 4th-year girl collided with yet another cauldron and sent its red-hot contents splashing onto Myron and Alex, who lay on the ground in a tangle of naked limbs and groans of ecstasy.

At precisely the moment Snape grabbed a fistful of Amy's hair, her wand exploded of its own accord and sent him hurling toward the opposite end of the room. He shattered against the wall and became a bloody mass of dead toads massacred in formaldehyde— _mortified_ in red Preserving Solution—and it reminded her of—it reminded her of—

"Really, Severus," interrupted Slughorn from the door, where he suddenly appeared wearing a salmon-colored fez hat and a look of gentle fatherly disapproval. "You ought to exercise better control of your classroom."

Slughorn then turned to Amy and pulled a bag of sweets out of thin air. He gave it a jaunty little shake in her general direction and asked, "pineapple?"

* * *

She woke in her own bed in the Slytherin dorms on the last day before Christmas holidays. She felt sick and dirty; covered in sweat, her heart pounding against her ribcage like a wounded animal, her belly on fire and knickers sodden, and found that Alex was talking to her.

"Amy? Are you awake?"

"Um, yeah," was Amy's groggy, breathless reply.

"I'd like to see it," Alex whispered into the night. It sounded like a confession.

"See...what?" Amy breathed.

"Azkaban," Alex said softly. "I'd like to see it."

"Well, it's not like it's going anywhere."


	5. The Dog

"Your parents," Snape intoned slowly, his teeth barred unpleasantly against the cold, "are truly terrible people. Did you know that, Bartleby?"

"They're all right," she said.

"They're a fucking quarter hour late, is what they are."

"Maybe they thought you meant seven P.M., not seven A.M. They're not really morning people."

Snape merely swore against something that sounded an awful lot like 'the blasted cold,' visibly shivering as they stood waiting for her parents by the front of the Castle. It _was_ bitterly cold this close to the solstice, of course, and she was fairly certain her own lips were turning blue, but it still surprised her to hear Snape be such a whinging little bitch about the temperature. She'd always taken him for the sort who would bear it stoically, even secretly enjoy it as a sort of passive form of self-flagellation.

On her right side, a thestral Amy shouldn't have been able to see stood yoked to one of Hogwarts' carriages. It pawed the ground as if it, too, had something better to be doing that morning. The illustrations really don't do them justice, you know. You couldn't possibly appreciate how surreal they are until you can actually see them.

On her left side, Snape drew out his pocket-watch. "I believe we've established a pattern. One would be tempted to think they didn't love you."

"You really shouldn't say things like that to people," Amy said, reaching her own—unfortunately un-gloved—hand toward the thestral. Interesting as it was to finally be able to see them, she found it disconcerting. They'd told her the boy survived—and it must be true, because why would they lie about that? She wondered just how exactly that rule about seeing death and thestrals worked. Did it count if someone technically—but temporarily—died in front of you? Yes, that must have been it.

She told Snape, "You probably shouldn't have asked them to come this far, either. Diagon Alley would have been closer."

"May I remind you that remanding juvenile delinquents back to the custody of their parents is a courtesy done at _my_ convenience? I will make the appointment for whatever time and place I damn well please," he snapped.

The thestral's nose was velvety and warm under her touch, not at all cold or reptilian like she thought it would be. It's funny, they're supposed to be creatures synonymous with death and decay, but right now it seemed very, very much alive. Would Snape's thin frame be radiating heat and life, too, if she were the kind of person who dared get closer to him?

Dared to kiss him?

She licked her lips, where the memory of Snape's lingered like a ghost's caress. She'd worried over that memory so many times in the weeks since it happened that she was no longer even sure it _had_ happened. Snape certainly gave no intimation that he remembered.

This was probably for the best.

"Fucking twenty minutes late, now," Snape was saying under his breath. He closed the watch and shoved it into his pocket, then shot her a look of pure loathing, as if she were directly responsible for her parents' pathological tardiness.

The thestral nuzzled her hand. Amy felt an inexplicable surge of fondness for it.

"Damn it, Bartleby, stop _playing_ with that wretched thing before it bites you and I have that to contend with, as well," he snapped.

Amy turned to him, surprised. "You can see them, too?"

"Of course I can fucking see them."

Of course he fucking could.

Amy shoved her hand back in her pocket and scanned the skies for the owl that would tell her that her parents had died, or disowned her, or otherwise left her alone with no friends in the world but the murdering angry alcoholic at one side and the harbinger of death at the other.

She didn't see one.

Snape went for his pocket watch a third time, as if that would somehow speed up the process, muttering darkly to himself about the situation being 'ridiculous' and her parents being 'ungrateful lay-abouts.' You had to admire any man who could stand there and abuse the people who'd given him the cloak on his back.

Yeah, that's right. He was wearing the new cloak. It smelled like winter, cold and dry and stiff, like his lips brushing up against hers.

"What an atrocious waste of my time," he spat.

She wondered what Snape would be doing that she was interrupting. You tended to forget professors existed when they weren't giving you detention or demonstrating the proper way to prune a Venomous Tentacula. Would he be going to his own home for the holidays? It was such a funny thought, Snape having a 'home' somewhere, but surely he didn't live at Hogwarts all 365 days of the year. He'd go mad. There must have been an address somewhere connected to his name. A kitchen with dusty glasses. A severely neglected cat.

She was about to suggest that he simply leave her to wait on her own, or, if he couldn't bring himself to abandon his duty as guardian _in loco parentis_ , Apparate her home, but a paper airplane appeared with a pop, literally out of nowhere, and began nudging Snape.

He snatched the note out of the air and positively _threw_ it at her as if to say that they were her terrible fucking parents, so she could read whatever terrible fucking excuse they had for being late.

"I'm sure they have a good reason…" she began, unfurling the airplane.

"Then by all means, enlighten us both as to what that _good reason_ might be," Snape snarled back, his arms folded in front of him.

She bent her head and read, but it didn't take her very long to realize the note had nothing at all to do with her or her terrible parents. The broken seal didn't even have her family emblem on it.

_**Severus,** _

_**I regret to inform you that...** _

Jesus Christ. That was gruesome. How awful.

"Do you… _Did_ you know Abraxas Malfoy?" she asked, looking up at Snape.

"I swear to Merlin if this is one of your asinine non-sequiturs…" he began. And the look on his face, all twisted with cold derision…

Well, it's why she didn't feel the least bit bad about breaking the news the way she did.

"He's dead," Amy said simply, handing over the note. "He slit his wrists in the bathtub last night."

At least she took a grim sort of satisfaction at the look of shock on his face.

* * *

Amy woke on Boxing Day to find the greying muzzle of a German shepherd three inches from her face.

She'd fallen asleep on the couch again.

The dog was a battle-scarred old thing with a notch missing from one ear, a slight limp, and the most disconcerting habit of staring at you while you slept. Some dogs licked, others barked, but this one just woke you by sheer force of will.

Amy rubbed her eyes, wincing at the sharp feeling of crystalized eye goo digging into her tear ducts, and turned over so her back was to the dog. She stared at the dusty upholstery of the couch cushion, so superior to the leather of the Slytherin common room because your skin didn't get stuck to it, and thought that she liked this place.

Her childhood home had the air of a once-dignified country house that had fallen into the hands of people who liked to read but didn't much care for cleaning. There were old newspapers and books stacked on nearly every surface—including, here and there, the floor. Half-drunk cups of tea left half-moon stains on half-read novels, which didn't bother Amy on principle so much as she couldn't shake the paranoid thought that Madam Pince would suddenly materialize just to have a fit about it.

But, no, Madam Pince never showed up. The air wasn't charged with the magic and drama of a thousand teenagers each convinced that they were the center of their own universe. The only voices she heard belonged to her parents. Amy could sleep where and when she wanted to, get up only when she felt like it, and have a pee without listening to the girl in the next stall have one, too.

It was all very pleasant, those two weeks in the winter and two months in the summer that she stayed here. Rather like being a houseguest at a low-key bed and breakfast that changed minutely every time she visited. New towels in the downstairs bathroom, one year. A missing painting in the sitting room, the next. It was a little alienating after seven years, the cumulative effect of all these changes.

When, for instance, had they gotten a dog?

Amy closed her eyes and tried not to worry about it, but the dog was still staring at the back of her head—had been, for God knows how long—so she got up.

The dog led her past the missing painting, past the bathroom with the new towels, past the kitchen entrance where her parents' voices floated lazily out, and stopped at the front door. Amy opened it for him, but, like the thousand other times they'd done this in three days, all he did was stare doubtfully out at nothing.

Nothing out there at all except a statue of St. Francis and some dying hydrangeas.

She let him look for a while, wondering if it was possible for dogs to go senile, before closing the door and wandering into the kitchen. He stayed behind, unmoving, and stared at the door.

Amy's parents were absorbed in a late breakfast—a favorite daily ritual that might last as many as two hours, three if it was Sunday, and usually involved cold service and gossip. She could see that they hadn't bothered to cook anything, but were eating toast and picking on the remnants of a large gift basket that had been unwrapped last night.

"Unbelievable," Amy's father grunted from behind the Daily Prophet's obituary pages. "They're saying it was _Dragon Pox_."

Across the kitchen table, Amy's mother stopped fussing with her toast just long enough to make a disapproving, skeptical noise. " _Dragon Pox_? At his age? How naïve do they think we are?"

" _Dragon pox_ ," Amy's father muttered again.

The _scrape-scrape-scrape_ of a butter knife against dry bread resumed.

The news that Abraxas Malfoy offed himself one week before Christmas spread at about the rate you'd expect these things to spread—quickly, and devastatingly. It had been less than a week since it happened, and Wizarding Britain was already abuzz with rumor and speculation; hungry for sordid details.

Amy's parents were no exception.

She understood why they were making all the fuss; she really did. You don't hear that the patriarch of Britain's oldest, Purest Wizarding family has slit his wrists in the bathtub and feel confident about the future of your race, after all. Still, Amy wished they would talk about something else. It was already hard enough to keep her mind off the thing. It wasn't like she was upset about it or anything—she'd never even met the man. Neither did it needle at her philosophical side. She wasn't working through the nuances of some grand epiphany about life or death or choice.

It's just she couldn't help thinking that he must have been naked.

There she'd be in her childhood home with its inexplicable dog and quaint domestic debris all decked out in tinsel, and— _bam_!—all of the sudden there's this dead old man bobbing up between her and her soft cheese sampler. He would pop up at the most inopportune times, just floating there all naked and bloodless and waterlogged, pink-soapy bathwater staining the crevices between his wrinkles.

Her father's voice cut through that unpleasant image.

"It's Lucius' neo-fascist politics that killed him, if you ask me," he said suddenly, his face surfacing from behind _The Prophet_. "Lucius and his—oh, good morning, Amy."

Henry Scrivener was a self-described 'gentleman farmer' remembered in Amy's childhood merely as an agreeable fellow who had red whiskers and liked boring things. He enjoyed words like 'neo-fascist,' reading dirty French novels in his study, and once got an entire day's worth of entertainment out of watching his six-year-old daughter scour the property for Gentleman Trees, and then another when he gave her a spade and told her that gentlemen grew underground.

Amy's mother looked from her toast to her daughter. "Done with your lie-in, I see? Have a biscuit. I think your father is about to saint Mr. Malfoy just because he's gone and died," she said cheerfully, and gave her husband a playfully challenging look from behind wire-rimmed spectacles.

The only thing in the world Selina Scrivener loved more than her pet jarvey was being right, and she had a thousand little tricks to make sure she always was. Amy had to learn from her mother that a 'gentlemen farmer' had nothing to do with farming gentleman and was actually just another word for being idle in the country. People who were idle in the city were called 'politicians.' And, if you did everything for everybody without any thanks whatsoever, people called you 'Mum.'

Amy sat and suffered the gift basket to tip a few slices of smoked gouda and some crackers onto her plate, then noticed that the inexplicable dog had appeared at her elbow, and was staring.

"Saint the man?" Henry repeated, appearing to quite enjoy the prospect of a noon debate. "I never even _liked_ him. My only contention is that Lucius's radical beliefs—"

"—Killed him," Amy's mum interrupted, setting her toast down. "As if Abraxas didn't have his own share of radical beliefs."

"What Abraxas _believed_ and what Abraxas _did_ were always two very different things, Selina," Amy's father said, folding the obituaries back into neatness. "We knew the man, for Merlin's sake. Forward policies and radical acts never suited him, not even when he forced that Mudlood Minister out of office in '68. Lucius is a positive zealot, comparatively." He set the paper in the middle of the table, right between a book about topiary and a jar of cocktail olives.

Amy surreptitiously tipped a slice of cheese onto the floor for the dog, but he merely sniffed at it unenthusiastically before staring up at her again.

"Well, I might have died of shame, too, seeing my own child like that," Selina conceded, which is what she did when it turned out the conversation simply wasn't as lively as she'd hoped. She picked up her toast and began scraping again. "He made quite the picture at the Wizengamot, waltzing in like the prodigal son returned, Bella's sister on his arm and that newborn son in tow, pleading some ridiculous story about Imperius."

Sounded more to Amy like the prodigal zealot Lucius was pleading imperious.

Haha, get it? _Imperious_?

No?

That's okay. Amy's parents didn't get it, either. It wasn't really very funny, anyway.

Amy's parents gave each other The Look, the one that said they half-expected to come home one day and find their adult daughter trying to dig gentlemen out of the garden. Then they gave her The Look. Feeling left out, Amy gave the dog The Look.

Henry Scrivener cleared his throat unnecessarily. "Well, _anyway_ …that's exactly my point. Abraxas always went out of his way to work in the background. While Lucius was running around playing Death Eater dress-up—a foot soldier, for Merlin's sake—Abraxas was losing everything. He lost Minister Bagnold. He lost Barty Crouch—."

"—I wouldn't go so far as to say he _had_ Crouch," Mum interrupted. "That relationship was never good."

"It was better than his relationship with Madam Bones."

 _Scrape-scrape-scrape_ said the toast. Madam Bones was a bit of a sore subject.

"Where was I?" Amy's father asked, also unnecessarily. "Right. He lost Bagnold in the Ministry, Crouch in Law Enforcement, and god knows what back-room deal forced him out of Hogwarts last term."

"Hogwarts?" Amy interrupted without thinking. "What did he have to do with the school?"

"He was on the Board of Governors, Amy. Everybody knows that," Mum said.

'Everybody knows.' It was like some damned conspiracy whereby 'everybody' got together at the monthly 'know' meeting and never failed to lose Amy's invitation.

"What, like 'everybody knows' that Professor Snape was a Death Eater?" Amy said, because she's an idiot. A little voice in her head told her that she'd just brought about the death of conversational subtlety everywhere. How the collective sense of decency mourns.

Her parents exchanged The Look again.

"Do _not_ even mention that horrible man to me, Amelia," Mum said.

Amy's pick-up, shockingly, had not gone very well. Snape had been absolutely livid by the time her parents finally did show up, while they insisted that getting worked-up over a measly little half hour was 'a sign of a diseased mind.' On the plus side, though, it worked out rather well for Amy. Her parents were too busy being angry at their daughter's terrible teacher to be angry about their daughter's terrible grades. Snape, meanwhile, was too angry about his student's terrible parents to be much bothered by his student's terrible…everything. She wondered if this was what it felt like to be a child of divorce.

Amy's parents changed the subject after that.

They abused Lucius Malfoy a little more—hypocritically, in Amy's opinion. These _were_ the people who'd been so friendly with the Lestrange cousins, after all—then discussed their plans for the upcoming year. Something about a wine festival in the Champaign region of France or an opera in Vienna. Whatever. It sounded boring and pretentious and full of people who used words like 'neo-fascist' while they drank. The white wine would look like watered-down piss and the red would be the exact same color as bloody bathwater.

 _Bam_!—dead old man.

Can you imagine finding someone like that, so utterly stripped of dignity and decency? Who discovered Abraxas' body, she wondered, and was the water cold, when they did? She tried to envision it as dramatically as she could in an effort to feel something appropriate about the whole thing, something other than nausea. The scene developed slowly, with Lucius himself seeing his father's body for the first time, and attempting a desperate revival effort, and invariably failing. He collapsed into a sobbing, hysterical heap on a floor slippery with the diluted lifeblood of his heritage.

She tried, anyway.

But then Abraxas Malfoy was naked again, his wizened old man penis flopping and flaccid in her head.

_Jesus._

Somewhere, a million miles away, somebody spoke.

"…Amy, so you'll have to use a Sticking Charm."

"Huh?" she said eloquently. "I'll have to use a sticking charm for what?"

Her mother tutted impatiently. "For your new gown, Amy. The zipper's a bit funny."

"Why am I wearing a new gown with a funny zipper?" Amy asked, trying her best to act like a normal person who could keep up with a conversation and definitely didn't have tiny professors and naked Malfoys living in her head.

"Because it was the only one they had in your size."

"No, no, I mean, why am I wearing a new gown in the first place?" she asked.

"For Merlin's sake, Amy," her mother said irritably, "Haven't you been listening? It's for the _funeral_. We're going to Mr. Malfoy's _funeral_." She punctuated the word 'funeral' both times by pointing at Amy with her butter knife.

"Wait, what!?" Amy said, alarmed. " _I'm_ going? But why do _I_ have to go?" And, _Jesus_ , did that come out whinging and petulant.

"Because I won't have you sitting here feeling sorry for yourself all holiday!" Mum snapped.

Even she could hear how bitchy that sounded.

Amy looked imploringly at her father. He picked up the cocktail olives and suddenly became very interested in fishing one from the bottom of the jar, the traitor.

"We should pay our respects," Amy's mother continued more gently. "And, anyway, we haven't seen any of those people since Evan's wedding, and—"

But Amy's mother was interrupted by a squeaky, weasel-y voice just outside the kitchen window.

" _Bloody—'come 'ere, you bugger!"_

It was, unmistakably, the aforementioned jarvey that Amy's mum loved so well. There was a hurried scurrying sound, like the jarvey was trying to dig something out of a burrow.

Sure enough, the next thing they heard was a different, equally small voice panting _, "'Gerroff me! Gerroff me!'"_

More scuffling, struggling—and then the horrible sound of ripping flesh and crunching bone to indicate that the jarvey had just murdered another garden gnome. Amy could see it now, the glistening viscera exposed to all the world, a bloody mess of intestines strewn across the snow like slimy pink-and-grey sausages filled with shit and shot through with pulsating blood vessels. She could practically _smell_ it, too, the slaughterhouse stench of mingling blood and—

"Don't make that face, Amy, you know what they do to the tulips," Amy's mother said matter-of-factly. She paused to listen, then remarked, "About time, too. I swear those gnomes are getting smarter."

"Well, the jarvey keeps killing the dull ones, doesn't it?" Amy said, thinking about Kettleburn's lecture on natural selection as she willed the sick feeling out of her throat. "In a couple generations, they'll be marching on the Ministry, demanding the right to use a wand."

Her father took the bait. "You know, she's got a point about that. They'll probably be followed by a pack of jarvey barristers—Oh, God, just picture them in little _hats_ ," he said, and chortled over the sound of sharp teeth breaking fragile bone.

"I don't think the jarvey's getting smarter," Amy said, disgusted. "More vicious, maybe."

"Excellent!" her mother exclaimed, exasperated. "The genius gnomes and vicious jarveys will fight it out on the steps of the Wizangamot, and we'll finally know whether the quill is mightier than the sword!"

Amy's father spilled olive brine on the table cloth laughing at that one.

Mum followed up by pointing at Amy with her butter knife again. "In the meantime, Amy, I need you to try on that gown."

So Amy tried on the gown.

It was a stiff, cheerless blue conservatively cut in wool or some equally itchy material that reminded her a little bit of Snape's teaching robes, except that Snape's clothes conferred authority. Reflection-Amy merely looked like someone's sullen teenage daughter with her dead hair and round shoulders and fundamental lack of grace. Either her mother's taste had suffered a nervous breakdown, or she'd scoured the globe for the single ugliest dress in all existence and not stopped to rest until she found it. Perhaps the intention was to shame the wandering male gaze.

Even the inexplicable dog hated it.

Her father barely glanced up from his olives, disinterested, but her mother got such a smugly satisfied look, Amy was certain she knew just how ugly the thing was, the bitch.

"It's itchy," Amy protested.

"So cast a Softening Spell," her mother said airily, as though she were the one being ridiculous.

"Why are these pockets here?" Amy asked.

"They're _practical_ , dear."

"Practical," Dad echoed vaguely.

"I look like a walking obituary," Amy said.

"Well, thank God we're not going to the theatre," Mum retorted.

"I don't like it," Amy said, as though that settled the matter.

"Fine. Go naked, then," her mother snapped, and took a vicious bite of the toast she'd babied all morning.

Her father began to laugh. And then he kept laughing. Loudly. Heartily. With tears appearing at the corners of his eyes. The jar in his hand threatened to spill olive brine all over the table again.

"For Merlin's sake, it wasn't _that_ funny," her mother groused.

"No, no, I've just gotten it! _Imperious_! Lucius pled _imperious_. It was a pun, Selina."

"Was it?" her mother said. "Imperius. Imperious. Oh, _Imperious_."

" _Imperious_!"

"Well, that was fairly clever, Amy."

Her parents were okay people, actually. They didn't much like to clean and frequently forgot to cook, but they were smart and funny and they taught her how to read when she was little. That's why she doesn't harbor any resentment about it. About the fact that they left her at Hogwarts for three whole hours after it happened. They're entitled to go out to a party. In France. Three hours away from even the fastest emergency owl post.

Honestly, nobody just sits at the Floo all day, waiting to hear that their daughter's been raped.

* * *

Amy had seen Lucius' photo before, in the paper—his wedding announcement or something—but, like an illustration of a thestral, it didn't do the real thing justice. He was an absurdly good-looking man in an antiquated kind of way, like he'd walked straight out of a pre-Raphaelite painting for the sole purpose of restoring old-world splendor to his surroundings. Pale, with platinum blonde hair that Amy would have killed for, he couldn't have been older than thirty. His dress robes looked incredibly expensive. He smelled good.

Snape looked strange sitting next to him.

They were a study in contrast, sitting there in the opulence of Malfoy Manor waiting for the eulogy to begin. If Malfoy was the prodigal son, then Snape was the bastard: corrupted, somehow, but burning with a fierce, hardened independence.

This was December 28th, 1982. Abraxas Malfoy's funeral was held at his ancestral home, Malfoy Manor. It was a snowy day, and so dark and overcast that one was hard-pressed to guess where in the sky the sun was hiding. It wasn't particularly cold, however. Had Abraxas not been dead, it would have been a good day to have cousins over for a Christmas party, and watch as their children played with enchanted snowballs on the grounds. At least, that's what Amy would have liked to be doing, had things been different.

As the officiant droned on about Abraxas' life, Amy wondered if Snape had ever played in the snow. Surely that was a universal childhood experience in Britain. Yet it was difficult to imagine Snape had ever been any younger than the 17-year-old god she'd stared at across the Common Room. And, anyway, he was probably the kind of kid who didn't so much have a childhood as just sort of waited awkwardly for adulthood to start.

Outside, the snow continued to fall.

When the formal eulogy was over, it was time for friends and family to speak. Walburga Black was the first to totter to the pulpit and scandalize them all by reading an absolutely hopeless bit of prose:

"There are certain queer times and o-o-occasions in this strange mixed affair we c-call l-life" Madam Black began, her jowls quivering just as tremulously as the hands which clutched a bit of parchment between them.

" _She's gone batty, I tell you,"_ somebody whispered.

" _For God's sake, Amycus, the witch lost both sons barely over a year ago..."_ somebody else hissed back.

" _So did Lestrange. You don't see her whinging."_

" _Well, Lestrange wasn't sleeping with him, now was she? Now be quiet."_

Madam Black dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief and started over: "There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life, when a man takes this whole universe for a vast p-p-practical j-joke."

Madam black paused to sob for another moment or two while the audience shifted restlessly. Amy watched Lucius Malfoy's knuckles whiten as he gripped the snake-headed cane he'd inherited from his father. Though whether in stoic grief or downright rage that this elderly woman was ruining a perfectly good funeral, she couldn't say.

" _I'll thank sweet sufferin' Christ when tha's over,"_ somebody sitting next to Amy's mum whispered. " _Sooner we get 'im in the ground, sooner we can give 'im a real send-off."_

" _Oh, got some unsuspecting Muggle to torture in his honor, Walden?"_ returned Amy's mum with a smile.

" _Nah, 's not like the old days, is it? Me and the boys are goin' round the pub. By t'eh way, How's things workin' ou' with the dog—"_

" _Shh!"_

The batty old woman tilted her head back and closed her eyes in one final attempt to grasp after her dignity through the misery. "A vast practical joke," she repeated, "though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own." She paused to let the words take effect. Then, finally: "That was from Abraxas' f-favorite author," she sobbed. "H-Herman Melville."

That's when Amy laughed.

Actually _laughed_.

She laughed loudly. Inappropriately. Right there in the middle of the pretentious hall with its pretentious people.

Because isn't it _funny._

Isn't it just laugh-out-loud ironic that she's sitting in the middle of this Death Eater reunion pretending to be a funeral, and all anybody can do is snipe and gossip, and it just so happens that _Melville_ was the departed's favorite author. It could have been literally anyone else, but it wasn't. It was Melville. Melville, who also wrote _Bartleby the Scrivener_.

She thought she understood exactly what Melville meant, about life being a vast practical joke. And she _laughed_.

" _The nerve,"_ someone spat lowly.

Her mother, the filthy hypocrite, smacked her upside the head. Hard. Her scalp stung while she watched Snape watch the body be interred in the frozen earth. It still stung a little bit while she tried not to stare at him by drowning her social ineptitude with some expensive champagne that she was undoubtedly too base to appreciate. It stopped stinging when she finally fled, fuzzy-brained, to the front steps of the Manor so she wouldn't have to try not to stare at him anymore.

Sunset had slipped into frigid night by the time Amy found a place to be alone. The front steps were cold and hard, but the air outside was abundant. New. Clean. As though the evergreens on the property had just finished making it, and it hadn't yet had a chance to pass through the gasping mouths of strangers.

It was still outside, and silent. There was something a little beautiful in the winter, though, that she'd never noticed before. Something about the way that the moon illuminated snowdrifts and icicles. The entire Manor property seemed spun from the vapors of an opium dream.

And then Amy decided that describing anything as 'spun from the vapors of an opium dream,' even in internal monologue, was a very bad sign indeed, and so she sat down. The stone bannister seemed like the perfect place to cool her fevered forehead, and it was. She watched snow move in the distance for a while before realizing that it wasn't snow at all, but an albino peacock lost in the contrast of white on white.

It really was quite nice.

And then somebody had to go and ruin it all by coming outside, too. She looked back.

Of course.

It was Snape.

She thought, for one insane moment, that he'd actually followed her outside until she saw the unlit cigarette in his hand, and the expression on his face. There he was in his forbidding black, looking ridiculously incongruent without his dungeon backdrop, scowling down that great ugly nose at her as if to say, _You? Again?_

She opened her mouth to say—what, exactly? 'Good evening, Professor. Having a nice funeral?'—and closed it again at the futility of the project. He had turned his attention to something in the distance, anyway, trying his best to ignore her, and didn't seem to notice.

They existed like that, on the awkward, ragged edges of someone else's tragedy, for a while. It's not like she was expecting him to say something. Definitely she couldn't feel the heat bleeding off of him, or smell that strangely familiar, homey scent of smoke and damp wool that seemed to cling about him. Certainly she didn't half-hope he would drape his cloak around her because it was cold.

Amy almost jumped out of her own skin when one of the peacocks made a long, echoing noise that didn't belong in this English winter.

"How do they survive?" she asked, unable to help herself. "Isn't it too cold?"

"Abraxas bewitched them with a warming charm every season," Snape answered smoothly, his words a coiling issue of smoke and steam.

She looked up at his profile. "Really?"

He scoffed, which she took to be an answer in the negative. "Someday, long after my own funeral, perhaps you will learn to see the difference between fantasy and reality," he said with a bitterness that she doubted had anything to do with her. Was it possible that a man like Severus Snape could be troubled by thoughts of his own mortality?

"Did you know him? The departed?" she asked.

"Not well," he answered shortly. "Not that I find it particularly _funny._ "

She ignored the jab. "But you must know the others, then?"

"Shocking though you may find it, I do have some miserable excuse for a private life, Bartleby."

Did he? She wondered if he had a girlfriend, and then frowned. 'Girlfriend' and 'Snape' were two more words that didn't belong in the same library, let alone the same sentence. If he had anything, it would be a…

…A 'lover,' perhaps?

"You don't seem to get along with the other professors," she observed.

He sighed. "Go inside, Bartleby, before you freeze to death and deprive us all of that keen talent for stating the obvious."

Amy stood up, smoothed the wrinkles on her hideous dress, and ascending the steps to join him on the landing. "This isn't Hogwarts," she reminded him. "I can freeze to death out here if I want to."

He responded to that by irritably flinging his cigarette butt into the night. "Turn around, then," he said.

"What—why?" she said, surprised.

"Because I asked you to," he answered shortly.

Slowly, reluctantly, she did. Amy heard him take a step toward her, felt his sudden looming presence at her back, and almost cringed away.

" _Relax_ ," he said quietly. "This will only take a moment."

'This' was him placing his hand on her shoulder, the calloused pad of his thumb against the skin of her neck, and the tips of his fingers over her collarbone. It was his free hand traveling down nodes of vertebra with a strange, jerky hesitance, and coming to a rest between her shoulder blades.

'This' was, finally, the sharp susurration of a zipper.

All of the blood in her brain seemed to drain instantly to her cheeks, because 'this' was Severus Snape, and he simply didn't touch people. He didn't stand behind you with his cloak just brushing the backs of your thighs and his breath sliding over the top of your head. He didn't hold anyone's shoulder, or initiate physical contact that came very, very close to making a mockery of teacher-student boundaries.

It took her a few seconds to realize that the sound was him zipping _up_ her gown where it had, apparently, fallen a few inches because she'd failed to cast that Sticking Charm. He was covering her; fixing something that was out of order in his universe, and, no, that did not make it any less bizarre.

"Thank you," she eventually managed. She started to turn to face him, but he held her still. The heat from his hand sank heavily into her skin.

"He financed my apprenticeship," Snape said suddenly. Not really _to_ her, but just out loud. "Two miserable years pulverizing moonstone and chopping wolfsbane for the great Damocles Belby, and Abraxas financed everything, right down to a stipend for living expenses."

"That was…Generous," she said cautiously.

"Generous," he sneered at the back of her head. "They'll probably have a bloody portrait commissioned. 'Abraxas The Beneficent.'"

"So what did he want? From you, I mean, in return?" Amy asked.

Snape didn't answer, at least not immediately. His thumb played absently on the skin of her neck again, stroking back and forth. She felt the hairs at the back of her neck prick in a not-entirely-unpleasant fashion. When he did finally speak, there was something strange in his tone. Reflective, maybe. "And what is it that _you_ want from me, Bartleby?"

He released her shoulder then, and she turned to face him. Backlit by the glow of the Manor, Snape was a dark silhouette.

"Is it pity?" asked the silhouette. "Do you linger at my door because you have some neurotic need for my sympathy? My approval? Merlin forbid, my _touch_?"

Later, she will be angry about this. She will be absolutely _furious._ Because it isn't okay for him to do that to her. He is not allowed to touch her like she is something that is about to break, or which has already broken. Later, when she is back in her childhood home, tossing and turning in her too-small bed, she will decide that he has no bloody _right._ No _right_ to offer his understanding and then insult her for taking it.

Later.

"Well?" he prompted. "What say you? Or are you such a passive observer in your own life that you don't even know?"

She looked him square in the eye and held his gaze for a moment. "I say it's nice to be in the company of another monster."

That's when he laughed.

Actually _laughed_.

It was a single, half-amused bark of a laugh that, like his smile, didn't really improve him at all. He laughed as though there were something desperately, tragically ironic in what she'd just said, but she had no idea what it could be.

"There may be a spark of life in you yet!" Snape said, shaking his head in amusement. "A spark that wants kindling, to be sure, but a spark nevertheless!" He then brushed swiftly past her down the steps and began walking into the night like a dream. He'd almost reached the apparition point by the time she regained her ability to speak.

"Did it ever go away, your Mark?" Amy called across the snowscape. She had no idea why.

She didn't expect him to answer, either, but he did, after a moment. He stopped dead in the snow-covered path and said, without turning to face her, "Did yours?"

And then he left her there alone on the front steps, cold and vulnerable and stunned. A naked corpse with her dick swinging in the wind.

* * *

On the last night before she had to return to Hogwarts, the inexplicable dog found its way into Amy's bedroom and woke her up by staring.

"What?" she asked him.

He stared.

"Do you need to pee?"

He stared.

"There's nothing out there, you know. I'm not getting up just so you can look."

He didn't even blink.

"Here. Come to bed," she said, and patted the spot next to her on the bed in the hopes that he'd jump up and forget about the whole thing.

He didn't.

"You suck," she told the dog, and pulled the covers over her head.

He stared.

Amy managed to ignore him for about twelve solid minutes, but that was all. She got up and let him lead her down the stairs, past the bathroom, past the kitchen, and to the front door. She opened it for him. Snow was falling outside, and she could see, in the narrow column of illumination cast by the light of the house, that St. Francis had the bloody remains of that unfortunate garden gnome strewn at his feet like a sacrifice. The jarvey was probably cuddled up in a warm burrow somewhere, or else buried in her mother's sheets. Amy wouldn't put it past her to sleep with the awful thing.

But the dog?

He just stared into the void.

"See? There's nothing there," she said, and closed the door.

He remained at the door even as Amy turned to go back upstairs. Bloody demented animal. Probably had brain damage or something.

She was surprised to find her father in the sitting room, a dirty French novel in one hand and a cup of tea in the other.

"Couldn't sleep?" she asked.

Dad set his book face-down on his knee and fixed his daughter with a mournful smile. "We've been waiting for you to say something about him," he said.

"About who?" Amy asked, thinking, inexplicably, of Snape.

"Jupiter," her father replied, tipping his cup of tea toward the dog. "It's 'Jupiter.'"

Amy looked back at her parent's insane dog. "Jupiter? Looks more like a German Shepard to me," she joked.

Her father didn't laugh.

She cleared her throat and tried again. "Gee, Dad….I, ah, don't know what to say. You and Mum can get a dog if you want to. I don't mind, either way."

"We got him for you. He's your Christmas present."

"Oh," she said, taken aback. "Thanks. That's, umm…." She looked doubtfully back at the dog, who was staring at the door where she'd left him. Somehow, she couldn't even pretend to feel enthusiastic about it, no matter how ungrateful it made her feel. "…That's swell."

"You don't recognize him, do you?" Amy's father said.

"Should I?" asked Amy.

"Do you remember the day you got lost in the Floo? You were nine."

"I still don't see what's so funny about that," she said, irritated that they kept bringing that up and failing to see what it had to do with her crappy present. "I could have ended up anywhere, couldn't I? Some Knockturn Alley cathouse, or a pedophile's living room."

"But you didn't. You—"

"Yeah, I've heard the story," Amy interrupted. "I ended up in Mr. Lestrange's flat, and they brought me home, and you thought they were the most charming young revolutionaries. They ended up staying for dinner and you all discovered you were cousins and had a good laugh about the thing and—"

"And you were terrified."

She blinked at her father, surprised. The graveness of the admission was jarring. Her father was the agreeable fellow who had red whiskers and liked boring things. He read dirty novels and made dry puns for jokes. He didn't say anything that seriously unless it was about politics.

"I was," she agreed carefully.

"And you told us the only thing that made you feel safe was that dog. You were so frightened, you wouldn't even tell them your Floo address. Not Rudolphus, not Rabastan, not even Bella. You would only tell Rabastan's dog, Jupiter."

Memories are tricky things. Highly suggestible. We can forget, we can remember, we can utterly fabricate them. It's why, even though Aurors do take and store memory evidence, that evidence isn't fully admissible in the Wizengamot. There's no way to ever truly be sure of a memory's veracity.

It may have been that Amy completely fabricated the memory that suddenly came to her under her father's suggestion. She might have pulled the terror and the hopelessness from another experience, glued it onto the recollection of petting a different dog, and pasted that onto a photograph of Rabastan Lestrange she'd seen in the paper. It could have been that the memory of sitting in a foreign parlor, covered in soot and trembling and crying with her eyes screwed shut and snot flowing freely from her nose, was completely fabricated. It could have been that the recollection of a cold, wet nose and a friendly lick on the face, of putting her arms around something furry and warm and wet-smelling, was wrong. She didn't think so, though.

"How…?" Amy asked, pushing past the lump in her throat.

"Everything the Lestrange's owned was confiscated after the trial, including Jupiter. Everything was supposed to be destroyed, but your mother knows someone over at the Committee for the Disposal of Dangerous Creatures, and, well…"

He broke off tremulously and looked at her—really looked at her—for the first time since he'd been three hours late to pick her up from school last year. He looked at her like she was a stranger. Like she was the resurrected ghost of a child he'd once had, a child he'd failed.

"I am so sorry, Amy. For everything."

And Amy began to cry. She cried for herself, nine years old and lost, and for how different her life might have been had fate thrown her out anywhere but the living room of those three charming young revolutionaries. She cried for her father, this imperfect man she only saw for two weeks in the winter and two weeks in the summer; this man who was as flawed, as capable of error, as _human_ as anybody else.

She cried because she finally realized why Jupiter kept leading her to the door.

He was waiting for Rabastan to come home.


	6. Happy Birthday

"Myron…what the…what the fuck are you wearing?"

"I'm off to do field research, Alex. I need to fit in with my subjects—you know, camouflage myself."

"As a _gigolo_?"

He did, in truth, look a little like a whore standing there in the Great Hall with skin-tight dragonhide pants, a close-fitting jacket that seemed to be made entirely out of raven feathers, and nothing else. He was hairier than Amy might have guessed. She could clearly see a smattering of chest hair on well-defined pecs; a little trail starting at his belly button and disappearing under the waistband of his ridiculous pants. If she wasn't much mistaken, he was even wearing a little eyeliner. The one saving grace was the cello strapped to his back. At least he was a _musical_ whore.

Or a rock star.

Myron smirked. "You know, if you'd put any thought into your senior project, you might be doing something interesting, too, instead of writing a term paper on Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration."

"You know what, Myron? Fuck you and your _field research,_ " Alex said acidly. The term paper was a bit of a sore subject. "I hope you catch syphilis and grown cauliflowers on your cock."

"It's genital warts gives you cauliflower cock—but that's abstinence-only education for you!" Myron said brightly. He turned to leave with an arrogant little swagger, but stopped as though he'd just remembered something. He pulled a bit of parchment from—somewhere, Amy wasn't sure where he'd pulled it from and she was afraid to even contemplate it—and brandished it at Alex.

"This pass says I can take a guest, but seeing as you're so busy writ—whoops!" He had to duck the apple Alex threw. It landed in a golden platter on Ravenclaw's table, spraying everybody in the immediate vicinity with hot scrambled eggs.

"Hey!" a prissy Ravenclaw girl squealed.

"Very nice, throwing food!" Myron yelled loudly, pointing beyond Ravenclaw to the Hufflepuff table. "I saw that, Tonks!"

And then Myron strutted away amid a minor scuffle that ended in a massive deduction of House points from both Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff.

"I wonder what he _is_ doing, going out dressed like that every hour of the day," Alex asked after a while. She meant Myron.

"Umm…something about 'ethnomusicology?" Amy said, fiddling with a bit of egg on her plate. The details of Myron's senior project remained a mystery to everyone, and anybody who had the misfortune of being on the other end of an explanation got barraged with the sort of meaningless, made-up words that academics like to use. Words like 'ethnomusicology.'

"What the fuck does that—" Alex stopped herself. "It doesn't matter. _He_ can do whatever he wants wearing whatever he wants. _I'm_ getting married."

Oh, haven't you heard?

Alex is engaged to be married. In six months' time, she'll be walking down the aisle in a white gown to join in the holy bond of matrimony with none other than Theodore Nott.

Yes, _that_ Nott.

Recently-widowed Theodore Nott who _everybody knows_ was one of the Dark Lord's very first followers. He was about a hundred years old and had a face the color of a veal cutlet. The idea was enough to turn Amy's stomach.

"We've already set a date, did I tell you?" Alex asked, staring lovingly down at her engagement ring. She kept angling her hand—just so—so that it caught the light and glittered with the light of a thousand dying suns or whatever.

"So, I guess you really—er—like him, then?" Amy asked doubtfully.

"Of course I do," Alex said sharply, frowning at Amy from across the table. "What do you think this is, an arranged marriage? Even my parents aren't _that_ conservative."

"I kind of thought you and Myron—"

"Myron was fun," Alex interrupted, a little too off-handedly, "but he isn't the sort of bloke you marry."

Amy shrugged, but if Alex noticed, she chose to ignore it.

"He's not that much older than me," Alex insisted to no one, staring at her ring. She was talking about her husband-to-be. "He's only fifty-six. That's nothing. And you should meet Little Teddy. He's the sweetest baby. You have to come to my hen party. It'll be just divine."

The transformation was remarkable. One second, Alex was a foul-mouthed beater; the next, she's starting to sound like Narcissa Malfoy, talking about babies and using adjectives like 'divine.' The worst part was, she seemed aware of how forced her pre-nuptial cheer was, but didn't seem able to turn it into anything but faux self-importance.

Maybe Amy should have seen this coming. There were no more Dark Lords to follow; no grand battles for the future of Wizarding society to be fought. The patriarch of Britain's oldest, purest wizarding family had slit his wrists in the bathtub, and Severus Snape was a _teacher_ , for God's sake. Wasn't it inevitable that they'd all have to adapt to this mundane new world with its field research and marriages of convenience?

She looked up at Professor Snape's empty seat at the head table.

Maybe fifteen years from now Snape will finally have drunk himself to death, and they will all convene at Malfoy Manor for his funeral, just for the hell of it. Maybe Myron will have a suit and a Ministry job and a balding head and wasn't it _funny_ that he used to think he'd be a rock star? And Alex will be showing off jewelry but hiding wrinkles and she'll introduce Little Teddy, who will be a surly teenager.

Maybe he'll say to Amy, 'did you know him, the departed?'

And maybe Amy will light up a cigarette with the tip of her wand, and say, shortly, 'Not well.'

_Jesus._

"The Notts are a really good family," Alex continued. "Theo can trace his family all the way back to the Statute of Secrecy. That's almost twenty generations. And they're one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, of course—and, oh, look, the post!"

A parliament of owls—seriously, that's the collective noun. Amy discovered it in the book Snape was making her copy—flew into the Great Hall in a fluttery rush of feathers.

She looked up hopefully—it was stupid, and childish, because it's not like Slughorn was ever going to write her back, and she hadn't sent any applications anywhere, but there was still this insane hope that somehow an owl would land and give her the news that she wasn't, after all, a total failure.

Maybe this was a part of the whole 'passive observer in your own life' thing.

Amy licked her lips involuntarily, the hairs rising on her neck as she remembered Snape's hand on her shoulder.

Whatever. It's not like Snape had anywhere to criticize. He wasn't even _at_ breakfast. In fact, she'd hardly seen him at all since that day at Malfoy Manor. She started to look up at his empty seat again, then stopped herself, because it's not as though she's getting obsessed with him or anything like that.

To Amy's left, Alex squealed in delight as a large barn owl from her intended landed on her plate.

To her right, some burly fellow whose name she never bothered to learn was already talking about playing on the reserve team for Puddlemere United as he relieved an eagle owl of its burden.

Down the table, Fiona got a little scops owl. And then—

"Oh. My. God!"

And that's exactly how Fiona screamed it, too. With this obnoxious little pause between every overemphasized word.

"I've. Been. ACCEPTED!" Fiona screeched.

It's not that Amy's bitter. Really. She's happy for Fiona.

Happy as a bloody clam.

Honestly, what kind of jerk wouldn't be happy to just whittle away the hours in hell while her stupidest roommate goes off to study at one of the finest post-secondary institutions in the wizarding world?

It's just that they'd talked about going to Salem Witch's Institute together last year. They were going to share a really sophisticated flat, and drink wine from California, and fuck _rugged_ men with strong, American jaws and names like "Trent" and "Clint."

Alex read a letter from her betrothed. Mr. Burly Fellow was accepted to Puddlemere, after all.

It's been like this since they all got back from Christmas holidays. Every morning somebody gets an owl. Hello, it's your future calling, and we're pleased to inform you that you've been accepted into the next stage of your life. Please find your scholarship award enclosed. It's the one with the really expensive parchment, right there next to your apprenticeship offer.

Amy watched as the last owl left the Great Hall in a fluttery rush of wings. No post for her, not today.

"I need to study," she said suddenly, standing and abandoning her plate.

Only Burly Fellow heard her. He looked over at her, surprised. "For…what?"

The N.E.W.T.s, of course. They're in, like, a couple months. What the hell else would Amy be studying for?

Burly Fellow blinked. "Oh…I, er…I didn't know you were taking them," he said.

What? Of course Amy was taking them. Why the hell wouldn't she be?

"Oh."

'Oh'? What does he mean, 'Oh'?

"Well, it's just…" Burly Fellow paused to suck in a breath, apparently considering. "It's just…Well, you haven't been going to class much. I mean, I can't even remember the last time I saw you in Charms…"

Ok, so she's missed some classes. So what? It doesn't mean she can't take the N.E.W.T.s.

"Actually…Well, you weren't in class, see…And so you, er…you missed the registration last term."

_What?!_

"Well, I think you can take them again in the summer. They do another round. You know, for people who fail the first time. Maybe if you go talk to Snape, he'll let you sign up for those," Burly Fellow said, grimacing.

Alex beat Amy to a response. "Oh, don't look as though he's just told you you're pregnant with a Squib," she said, rolling up her letter and smiling sweetly—too sweetly—at Amy. "After all, Fortescue's is always hiring—Oh, come on! Don't run off! Can't you take a joke?"

Hello? Is anybody there? It's your future calling.

What did you say your name was? Bartleby?

Sorry, wrong number.

* * *

It was done.

Amy had copied all 300 pages of the Medieval Language Association Handbook for Editors.

Okay, Amy had copied about 50 pages, then spelled a quill to do the rest for her. Still, it was a lot of work. The quill kept getting lazy and copying things in shorthand, or else the charm would begin to wear off and the next thing you knew, you were reading about _strait_ stirring rods instead of _straight_ ones.

She also had to teach it to mimic her handwriting exactly – but not too exactly, mind. It wouldn't do to have the text be too uniform, too artificial-looking.

The spellwork was tricky, and had required multiple references to library books with titles like _Enchantments for Editors_ and _Quick Quillwork._

Amy hadn't worked so hard on anything in _months_.

After copying everything, she'd taken the lengthy and boring exam in the back of the handbook, slid the whole mess in an envelope, and began the long journey from the library to Professor Snape's office.

It was a thin excuse to see him.

She _knew_ it was a thin excuse to see him.

But he was the one who'd assigned her the horribly tedious task, so he could damn well deal with the results. This was why she was seeing him, to call him on his dare. No other reason.

Certainly not.

Amy was so busy internally berating herself for being so fucking pathetic that she took a wrong turn at the bottom of a staircase.

Then she stopped.

Somewhere in the background, the sound of one of those ever-present subterranean leaks echoed ominously.

_Drip._

_Drip._

A profound sense of disorientation coiled around her. She was going in the wrong direction. Snape's office wasn't to the _west_ , it was to the east. Which meant…

Her stomach twisted into knots.

Which meant that, for the first time in nearly a year, she found herself standing in the corridor where she'd traded insults with with…

With _him_.

And right before Amy was the empty classroom where…

Where _it_ had happened.

The door to the disused classroom was unlocked and open just three inches. She stared through the slender gap for a few moments, struggling to overcome a sudden sense of unreality. Her legs tingled, poised and ready for fight or flight, and the overwhelming compulsion to look inside infected every pore.

The last time she'd been here, there was screaming, and blood, and pain. What would there be, this time?

Taking a shaky breath, then letting it out slowly, she reached forward and gave the door a gentle push. It opened surprisingly easily and almost soundlessly, as though the hinges had been recently oiled.

Well.

She didn't know what she expected. It's not as though the room would have been roped off like a crime scene or left sacred and untouched like a dead person's bedroom. The walls wouldn't still be coated in blood and shit. The furniture wouldn't still be upended. The screams wouldn't still be echoing across the stone walls, or the that particular slaughterhouse stench of rusty iron still permeating the air. Someone would have seen to that.

Still, she wasn't prepared for this overwhelming mundanity. The disused classroom was quiet now, and there was nothing at all inside but a few broken chairs and dusty boxes. It smelled like book dust.

On the wall opposite the door, someone—Peeves, maybe, or a disgruntled first-year—had scrawled the words "Snape Sux!" on the blackboard.

Everything was cleaned up and hushed up.

Like it had never even happened.

The silence buzzed oppressively in her ears.

"It wasn't that big a deal," she told the empty classroom.

Then she frowned as some disused neuron in a forgotten corner or her brain flared to life.

Had Snape been the one to find her here? Her and...and the boy? She remembered so little of that day, and had so steadfastly avoided thinking about what she could remember, that what she recalled now felt dreamlike and distant, like it had happened to another girl in a different life.

She remembered casting the curse, and she remembered scrambling to her feet as it took effect. She remembered backing into a wall, covering her face with bloody hands, and screaming and screaming and screaming until there were no more sounds left under her skin.

But did she also now remember someone pulling her hands away from her face? Someone hissing at her to be silent? To calm down? Had that someone been Severus Snape?

No.

That couldn't have been right.

Because how could he have gotten there so quickly, since he hadn't been in his office? Hadn't he been at the Quidditch game, with everyone else?

"What are you doing, Bartleby?"

The words, spoken from down the corridor, had the effect of a loud noise on a gun-shy dog. Amy started, let out a highly undignified yelp, and, as though the corridor itself slid sideways, lost her footing and fell flat on her bottom. Her elbow exploded in pain as it collided with the doorjamb on the way down.

Amy was painfully slow to process the deluge of sensory data that assaulted her after that. The pieces swam before her like a puzzle: Here, the _click-click_ staccato of boots against a stone floor. There, an utterly exasperated click of the tongue. Finally, the image of thin, pale lips, pressed together in a grim line. Only with a puzzle, you look forward to seeing the final result. It was with a feeling of doomed inevitability that the picture came together and she realized it was her Potions Professor looming above her, and that her wand was pointed directly at the hollow under his chin.

He had something to say to that, probably something like, "Put that thing away, before you injure someone, girl!" but the words slid over her brain without leaving an impression.

Amy lowered and stowed away her wand, breathing as if she'd just run circles around the Quidditch Pitch. She squeezed her eyes shut, cradled her injured elbow to her chest, and told him, "Jesus! Do you just stand in dark corners, waiting for someone to walk by so you can scare the piss out of them?"

At least, she meant to. What actually came out was more along the lines of, "Gaaarrrggh!"

He had something to say to that, too, but whether it was, "I apologize for startling you," or something more like, "pay attention to your surroundings!" she had no idea.

"Wha—what?" She asked, opening her eyes and looking up at him.

The corner of his mouth twitched restlessly before he spoke. "I merely asked if you were _all right,_ but based on your response to this extremely simple inquiry, I believe we have our answer," he quipped quickly, and then thrust his hand before her face.

Amy's response was to cringe slightly and stare at his hand—long, pale, spidery, with closely cropped and surprisingly clean fingernails, given how much time he spent working with disgusting Potions' ingredients. This was the same hand that had zipped up her dress outside Malfoy Manor and absently stoked her head once or twice as he welcomed her to hell. The same hand, possibly, that had pried her own from her face less than a year ago.

No, no. That _couldn't_ have been right.

Amy's gaze moved slowly past his hand, up a his lean, black-clad arm, and eventually rested on his face, prematurely lined, curtained by that greasy black hair, and currently wearing a queer expression.

Then the look was gone as he waved his hand impatiently in front of her face. "Sometime before we die of old age, girl," he snapped abrasively.

Oh.

He was only offering to help her up.

Well.

There was no need to be so rude about it.

Somewhat calmer, Amy put the hand of her uninjured arm to his. His palm slid past hers, the skin dry and surprisingly warm, and his fingers closed around her wrist before he pulled her up. As soon as she was standing, she cradled her elbow again and was surprised to find it wet. Peering down, she was even more surprised to find it bloody.

Snape's inscrutable black gaze followed hers. "I may have something for that. Come."

 _Click-Click_ went the staccato of his boots on the stone floor.

_Click-Click._

Feeling immensely miserable and dazed and stupid for ever coming here in the first place, Amy followed him to his office just a few metres down the corridor.

"Sit there and place your arm on the desk," he said as soon as they entered, indicating that familiar austere chair.

Amy did as he asked and looked again at her toad—the same one flayed and mortified on his desk that had been here earlier in the year. It was currently serving as a paperweight for more ungraded papers. His collection of those seemed to have grown exponentially over the holidays, as though, left alone for two weeks, they had bred like rabbits.

She sniffed and then wiped her nose as he rifled about in the ingredients cupboard. Small domestic noises followed in his wake; the soft susurration of his robes as he moved; the wooden creak of the cabinet; the crystal tinkling of the glass vial.

The half-remembered, can't-be-true image came to her again, the one of Snape pulling her bloodied hands away from her face as she screamed.

Amy pursed her lips together, willing the memory away. "I can just go to the Hospital Wi—" she began.

"Don't be ridiculous," her professor interrupted. It was his no-nonsense voice, the one he used in class.

 _Merlin_ , but he had a gift for that.

Whereas before it would have seemed ridiculous that Snape would personally patch up a student—why, after all, would he suffer one more unnecessary second with a pubescent irritant such as herself, when Madam Pomfrey was perfectly capable?—now it seemed ridiculous that he would do anything else.

Snape located what he was looking for and pulled it from the cabinet—a simple Healing Solution, she recognized, not anything furtive like a confiscated Memoriball or flask of gin.

She squirmed a little at the contact when he rolled her sleeve gently up past her elbow, suddenly flushed and hot in a way that had nothing to do with the external temperature. He said nothing as he cleared away the blood with his wand and then began applying the Solution. His was a physician's touch, gentle and clinical, with a certain graceful economy of movement.

It was completely anal-retentive, of course, but she still sort of admired it, his deliberation of movement. It was funny, because despite so many less-than-orderly facets of his life, despite the lousy lecturing and the sloppy drinking and the undone grading, she couldn't help but think that here was a man who would be able to pull himself together, after all.

Maybe he would still be together two thousand years from now, like one of those alabaster statues in Pompeii that survived the day the sky fell.

Or maybe he would die just like the Romans' precious tongue did, only to be remembered in borrowed conjugation and obscure academic nomenclature.

Amy pondered this until the silence became so oppressive that she found herself blurting out a question, something she'd desperately wanted to know but had barely allowed herself to think about, even in the privacy and silence of her own mind.

"What happened to him?" she asked.

"What happened to whom?" Snape responded absently, shifting her arm as he continued to apply the Healing Solution.

Amy breathed out slowly. "You know— _him_."

She meant her rapist.

Snape paused in his ministrations and looked up at her with an odd expression, as though, for once, he was actually interested to hear what she had to say. "Did nobody tell you?"

"They said—they said he survived," she responded, her tongue tied into awkwardness by taboo, or by Secrecy Magic. "That he lived."

Snape opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again and pinched the bridge of his nose as if fighting off a migraine—which must, she was convinced, be some kind of neurotic tic, because nobody could possibly have _that_ many headaches.

The spell of familiarity, or whatever it was, that had settled over them, clearly, had broken. Amy pulled her arm—the elbow stiff but no longer painful—out of his grasp, then stood up to leave.

"Why are you here, Bartleby?" he asked. "Other than to make my life exceedingly difficult? If this is about Flitwick, there's nothing I can do."

"Flitwick?" Amy asked. He may as well have said 'Kangaroo' for all the word made sense.

"Flitwick," Snape repeated, moving his hand away from his face to pin her with that black gaze. "He's dropping you from Charms. Surely you knew that."

Amy tried to care about this and failed. Wordlessly, she pulled the fully-copied MLA handbook from her bag—all 300 pages of it, painstakingly written in her own hand and bound stuffed in an envelope. Professor Snape took it from her with a look which suggested he'd forgotten he assigned that particular task, considered it for a few seconds, then threw it into the fire.

Amy watched as several months worth of her leisure time burned and thought _this_ was what he must have meant, about Hogwarts being hell.

Hell felt like burning alive from the inside out.

Hell felt like losing your mind.

* * *

Seafood.

Amy has never liked it.

The word, that is, not the food.

'Seafood' was so…vague. As though there's this thing called the 'sea' and human beings just drudge up all this crap, throw everything that doesn't taste good back overboard, and call whatever's left in the boat 'food.' From the 'sea.'

Apples and pork weren't called 'landfood,' but nobody has any problem with a culinary category that encompasses anything and everything that might be found in the two thirds of the Earth that is water. Lobsters to cod; squid to salmon; all of it is 'seafood.'

Salmon aren't even _born_ in the sea. They don't even _die_ there, for God's sake.

The only thing Amy despised more than 'seafood' was grading. And grading regurgitated essay after regurgitated essay about ingredient substation for individuals with 'seafood' allergies? Well, it was a pretty shitty way to spend her 18th birthday.

Whatever. 18th birthdays aren't anything to have kittens about. Especially when, per the conditions of your probation, you have fewer privileges than a 1st-year. Eighteen, and you can't visit Hogsmeade any time you want or keep your own broomstick. Eighteen, and you still get lost in the Castle sometimes.

At least her friends had thrown her a party in the Common Room. They served their favorite food and played their favorite music and put up their favorite decorations. Alex talked about her wedding and Myron sulked.

Meanwhile, Amy graded.

For Snape.

The lazy twat hadn't bothered to grade a single midterm; they had apparently sat, collecting dust, for weeks while he waited for his Fairy Godmother to do it for him. For weeks, he had neglected to grade, and, gee, wasn't it convenient that Amy had no NEWTS to study for and therefore nothing better to do than fix comma splices and subject-verb disagreement all day? All _month?_ She'd logged nearly 40 hours of grading already—he'd been making her keep count.

Snape had even included her peers' essays in the pile, and she, who wasn't even in the N.E.W.T.-level class, was supposed to grade them based solely on grammar, mechanics, and style. It was completely unprofessional, unethical, and she kind of thought they were past this point in their relationship. When Snape had her in his office, she thought...

Well, she didn't know what she thought. It just didn't seem fair that he could give her a drink in his rooms, stand with her outside a funeral, zip up her dress, and then go right back to pretending to be a teacher—even a lousy one.

She slashed through a sickeningly composed sentence on the use of Unicorn "hare" as a substitute for seal whiskers—because apparently semi-aquatic mammals count as "seafood" now, too— and took a vindictive pleasure in watching the red ink hemorrhage across the page.

Myron, sitting next to her and throwing dirty looks at Alex's prenuptial cheer from across the room, spoke: "So are you, like, Snape's TA now?" he asked.

"Uh-huh," she said. This was easier than explaining the truth: That in fact, she had no idea what she was to Snape. And, anyway, it's not like this was any of Myron's business.

"You do know there's a party going on, right? _Your_ party?" Myron pointed out.

"Uh-huh," Amy repeated, scrawling a "T" on the corner of the paper.

Myron looked over. "A 'T'? It can't be that bad," he said.

"It is," she assured him.

"Why? There's nothing even wrong with this sentence," he said, taking the paper and pointing to the offending sentence.

"Dangling participle," Amy said.

"And here?"

"Improper use of the subjunctive."

"Well, what about this one?"

"Plagiarized."

Myron blinked at her as if he wasn't sure whether to be impressed by her newly-bolstered editorial knowledge or mock it. "How can you even tell?" he asked.

Wordlessly, Amy took the paper back from him. She picked up the topic sentence—literally picked it up so that the words hung in mid air before her hand—and then threw it at one of the bookshelves in the common room. A book, _Intermediate Potions_ , glowed red, then zoomed over to Amy's table and magically opened itself to the plagiarized page. The sentence from the essay hovered over its printed twin.

Myron looked mildly impressed. "Where did you learn that?"

"It's just some stupid little spell," Amy said, putting the essay-sentence back on the page and sending the Potions book back to its shelf with a wordless flick of her wand. She'd learned it—along with dozens of other equally useless spells—in the MLA handbook Snape had made her copy. It was a welcome change to finally be good at something, even something as pointless as grading.

Alex's loud, false laugh issued from across the Common Room. She and Fiona were giggling over Mr. Veal Cutlet's most recent romantic missive. Myron pouted again.

"You guys weren't even dating," Amy pointed out.

"Yeah...well…" Myron trailed off, his dashed hopes fading into nothing along with the word 'well.' He wasn't as accustomed to disappointment as Amy was, and didn't take it very well.

"Why is she even marrying Veal Cut—Nott?" Amy asked.

"It makes sense for her," Myron conceded gloomily.

"It does?" asked Amy, who, Slytherin or not, couldn't think of a single reason she'd voluntarily fuck Mr. Veal Cutlet.

"Alex is broke," he said simply. "Her parents' assets—savings, her university gold, all of it—were frozen after her uncle was arrested. Knott has money. And a new baby that needs a mother."

Amy said nothing. 'Alex' and 'baby' and 'mother' were just more words that didn't belong in the same library. She picked up another of Snape's essays and started grading.

The Slytherins got extremely drunk that night and eventually turned to parlour games to entertain themselves. Someone conjured up a little play theater and, laughing, Amy's Housemates played out a humorous little scene. It was the sort of thing they might have done at a Slug Club Meeting.

The scene starred Alex as Trigger-Finger Tiffany, fastest shot in all of London. Admittedly, she did some pretty flashy wandwork, first conjuring magic birds with the _Avis_ charm and then shooting them out of the air one by one with her wand. Trigger-Finger Tiffany continued this for a while, performing ever more impressive feats of accuracy, until the Dastardly Mudblood appeared to steal her magic and her virtue. The crowd hissed and booed as Burly Fellow appeared on the stage wearing Muggle clothes and an exaggerated expression of stupidity.

"Alas!" cried Alex, now wearing a scarf over her eyes, "I've been rendered blind by stolen magic! Where is the scoundrel? Help me find him before I'm ravish'd!"

The audience began shouting directions, telling her which way to aim her curses.

"Left!"

"Right!"

"Further!"

"No, too far!"

"Curse his prick right off!"

Amy repeated the plagiarism checking spell on several more essays while the scene ended and the party disbursed. She sent books and words zooming through the air and covered essays with red ink before she caught the eye of a wide-eyed 1st-year from across the Common Room. The boy had been staring—Marvelling, perhaps, at Amy's nonverbal magic, at her best spot in the Common Room, at the way she and her friends drank whiskey and told jokes that would make you go redder than the Hogwarts Express. Maybe the boy was giddy for the day _he'd_ be someone's TA, and would have the power to pass or fail his peers with a simple flourish of the quill—more power than perhaps he'd ever dreamed of having.

Amy began to laugh. She kept laughing, tears streaming hysterically down her face, until her stomach ached and Myron felt the need to slap her several times on the back.

* * *

When Amy found herself, once again, standing outside the private entrance to Snape's quarters the night before yet another Hogsmeade weekend she wouldn't be attending, she decided that his was a story about failure.

It surprised her a little, the certainty of this judgement. She would know, though.

She's something of an expert on failure.

Because, let's face it, successful people simply don't find themselves on Ministry-ordered probation or fail every one of their classes or miss the registration for the NEWTS. They don't leave neurotic little drawings out for every Tom, Dick, and Harry to see or get dropped from their Charms class or find themselves drawn, again and again, to others whose lives are clearly going down in flames.

Successful people don't kiss their professors.

If Amy was a failure, she was at least in good company. Whatever it was Severus Snape had wanted to do, wanted to _be,_ it had not happened for him. He had not rid the world of Mudbloods and Muggle-Lovers and Trash that threatened their way of life. He was not awash in glory, but in ungraded papers. Whatever power the Dark Lord had given him, it was not enough to save him from rotting in this place. He was stuck at Hogwarts.

Just like she was.

Before she knew it, Amy had kicked his door as hard as she could.

 _Thud_.

No answer.

It felt good, siphoning all her anger and frustration into that kick.

She thought about every fucked-up thing that had happened over the last year, raised her leg, and kicked again.

_Thud._

Still, no answer.

Her foot was poised for a third kick, an angrier one, when Snape finally did open the door.

He was, to her surprise, fully dressed, boots and all. His teaching robes were slightly rumpled, as though he'd fallen asleep—or passed out, as the case may be—still wearing them. There were dark circles under his eyes, and the whites were red and irritated—but his expression? Oh, he was very much awake, and very, very livid.

"I just came to tell you that I hate your specimens," she told him.

That was the straw that broke the thestal's back. The last indignity he would suffer. Amy caught a brief glimpse of his expression, twisted with abject frustration, like she was literally driving him mad, before he slammed the door in her face. At least, he tried to, but she shoved her foot in the doorjamb at the last moment.

 _Merlin_ , did that hurt.

But the door also bounced back, and that allowed her the opportunity to squeeze inside.

Snape slammed the door behind her and then rounded on her. "What. The. _Hell_ do you think you are doing?" he demanded. The words burst like gunfire from behind his teeth.

"They're like something out of a nightmare, or a Kafka novel," she insisted, determined to push him, to make him feel as aggrieved as she did. "They depress the hell out of me, and one of these days I might just going to burn your office to t—"

"Sto-"

"—fairly certain you keep them just to terrify first-years. There's no conceivable use—"

"Silence!"

He took a step closer to her. She retreated a step in return. Her back touched the wall. And he was there, his mouth a crooked-toothed snarl of rage, his hand— _what is he doing?!_ —coming toward her. She braced for an impact, certain that he was actually going to physically hit her, but it never came. Instead, his hand slammed against the stone some six inches left of her head, and he leaned in so, so, so unbelievably close, as he had the first day in detention.

"Listen, _girl_ , I may have, in some misguided attempt to keep you from slitting your wrists and thus losing me my job, have allowed you certain liberties, but no more. I am not your friend. I am not your therapist —" here he placed his other hand some six inches to the left of her head, once again caging her with his arms " — And I do. Not. Fuck. Students. All of which is to say you have no reason to be here."

Something clicked, then.

I guess you could call it an epiphany. Maybe it was just a series of electrical impulses made seemingly profound by fear-induced adrenaline. Whatever it was, she got this funny little idea in her head all of the sudden, one that made her feel at once exhilarated and afraid; light-headed and deliciously deranged.

Has that ever happened to you? The feeling of being high on the possibility of an idea?

If so, you probably understand why Amy kissed him. Again.

It wasn't a stuttering of dry lip against dry lip, this time, but a forceful slide of mouth against mouth. Her brain became a useless mass of froth dribbling slowly down her spine, so it took her a moment to realize what was happening.

What was happening—impossible as it seems—was that he was _kissing her back._

There were a rush of sensations all happening simultaneously—his lips, surprisingly soft and supple, positively _attacking_ hers—his tongue slipping like a thief past her lips, skimming her teeth—his hand on her waist, clutching, sneaking upward over her ribcage, toward her breast—her hands, fisted in his shirt as she arched into his touch—a sudden need to press her thighs together—tingling in her spine—and melting, a most terrifying, thrilling sensation of melting.

Something between a growl and a groan began deep in his thin chest, shivered its way up his throat, and vibrated against her lips. The idea that this was in response to _her,_ and the power that implied, electrified every nerve ending and sent her head spinning in the most exhilarating, delicious way possible. She twisted the fabric covering his chest, clung tightly for support, and surrendered herself to the pure molten sensation. His lips slid from her mouth to that spot, just there, where her jaw met her neck. He captured her earlobe between his teeth and nipped. She felt like her brain was melting in her skull, like her knees were melting into the floor. Like her skin was melting to his.

And then she melted through the door

Understand this.

She _literally_ melted through the door.

One minute, she was standing in Snape's quarters, her back against the wall, receiving the most overwhelming, almost frightening, snogging of her entire life from her _Potions Professor_ of all people, the next, she stood in the dungeon corridor, her cheeks flushed, her lips stinging and swollen, positively _burning_ with the most confusing mixture of agitation and frustrated sexual desire. Right there in front of her was the door she almost kicked down, and Snape was on the other side.

How…how the _hell_ did he do that?

She heard the deadbolt click.

This manic little laugh bubbled up out of nowhere and found echoing freedom in the empty, subterranean corridor.

Do you want to know what that idea was? The one that made her kiss him?

As she'd been staring up at Snape, watching his lips move around the declaration that he did. Not. Fuck. Students, some neuron misfired in her brain, and she inexplicably remembered that thing he'd once told her. That thing about her having a spark of life in her yet.

She thought that maybe he was right.


	7. How Absurd

**How Absurd**

Glamours have never been Amy's strong suit. She'd always _wanted_ to be good at them, but she simply wasn't

So how she found herself standing over Alex, the latter's neck resting neatly on the edge of the bathroom sink, with a bottle of Celestina Warbeck's Fabulous Follicle Relaxer in one hand and a copy of _Witch Weekly_ in the other, she had no idea.

Maybe this was just another part of the whole 'passive observer in your own life' thing.

"Alex, maybe you should get someone else—"

"I did _your_ hair, didn't I?" Alex interrupted. "Are you going to return the favor, or are you going to be an ungrateful twat?"

"You haven't even let me see my hair, yet. You made me put this towel on my head."

"And I'll curse the damn thing to your head if you don't hurry up," Alex replied. "You've been promising you'd help me with this for weeks. Shit or get off the pot, Amy."

The bottle warned that itching, burning, permanent hair loss, and spontaneous Splinching might result from the use of this product. Celestina Warback was not responsible for any damages resulting from adverse reaction to the potion. She unscrewed the cap and gave a tentative sniff. It reeked like acetone mixed with Bobotuber pus and made her eyes water.

"This isn't the same thing you used on my hair," she told Alex.

"That's because you're _white_ , you stupid bi— _ahh_!" She broke off with a tiny yelp when Amy dumped the vile solution on her head with no warning and at least a small amount of petty satisfaction.

Amy still hadn't quite forgiven Alex for the Fortescue comment.

The product soaked in Alex's hair right up to the scalp with unnatural quickness and began to bubble as violently as a ruined potion. It looked extraordinarily painful. Amy turned her attention to the magazine while Alex grit her teeth just the way she used to when preparing a vicious hit to a Bludger.

"It says to cast the charm while the potion is still on."

"Then do that," Alex ground out.

Amy cleared her throat, raised her wand, and rapped Alex hard on the head. " _Mutatio Viridem_!"

There was a flash of light, a great deal of thick black smoke, and the entire bubbling mass that, presumably, held Alex's hair, turned bright bottle green.

A terrible shudder ran through Alex. "Rinse it out! Rinse it out!"

Amy turned on the faucet and began rinsing. Only a little bit of Alex's hair came out by the root. Hopefully she wouldn't notice.

Slowly, relief spread over Alex's face. " _Fuck_ , that hurt."

"I think it's all out," Amy said.

"Good. Now dry it."

Amy cast a drying charm and, to her immense surprise, the sink suddenly overflowed with large, loose curls that were silky soft and the exact color of the emeralds in the Slytherin hourglass. The whole thing screamed 'House pride' and, while fairly silly when you considered that this was all attached to somebody's _head,_ was nevertheless pretty in its own right. Amy was fairly pleased with herself when she remembered that _she_ had done that.

She only hoped Alex had done as good a job on her—Amy's—hair.

"Oh, my," said the mirror.

Alex jumped up and began examining the new hair-do in the mirror. She angled her head this way and that with a critical eye, her fingers combing easily through the locks, leaving no stone—or follicle, as the case may be—unturned.

"Not bad, Amy," she said approvingly. "Might have left the potion on longer, though. I'd hoped it would be straighter."

As if Alex would have let her.

"Well? Aren't you going to look at yours?" Alex asked.

Amy closed her eyes, pulled the towel off, opened them again, and—

"Red!" said the mirror.

"Red," said Amy.

"What?" asked Alex.

"It's _red_. You dyed my hair _red_."

"It's not _red_ ," Alex insisted. "The Weasley's have _red_ hair. That Potter woman had _red_ hair. That—" she pointed at Amy's head through the mirror "—is _strawberry blonde_. I dyed your hair strawberry blonde."

"It was supposed to be _brown_. You were supposed to dye it _brown_."

"Brown is boring. Brown is the color of shit. You don't have the jaw structure for brown."

"What the hell does jaw structure have to do with—"

"'Thank you' are the words you're looking for, Amy. As in 'thank you for turning that ashy shit-stain blonde into something sexy.' Even the mirror thinks so." She rapped on the glass with her knuckles. "Right, mirror?"

"Green! Green hair! What _will_ your husband say," it reproached.

"Oh, shut it, you," Alex snapped irritably. "It's not as though I'm wearing it to the damn wedding."

Both girls stared at their reflection-selves for a few more moments. Amy wondered if _this_ was the same girl Snape saw when he looked at her, and she became engrossed in the same line of thought that had occupied nearly every waking moment since that day in Snape's rooms, when she'd kissed him and he'd kissed her back.

There was a promise in that day, a promise of...

Of what, exactly?

It's funny. She'd pictured what came next in a thousand different iterations every day.

Sometimes, in her imagination, it was dreamlike and gentle, like his touch outside of Malfoy Manor. In these versions, Snape wrapped himself around her, and his skin felt warm and dry against her own. His caresses were solicitous and almost clinical, projecting the calm competence of one who knew exactly how to make her body respond. His kisses lingered, stroking and soft. Words whispered into her ear were low and formless, perhaps because the whole fantasy was so out of character that she was at a loss to fill in the specifics.

Other times, it was fevered and hot, with the same blood-pumping intensity she'd felt when she'd kicked his door and he'd kissed her back. These were the daydreams that made her feel wanted and flattered and powerful. When his skin touched hers, it burned with sweat and energy. His touches were carnal, his kisses demanding something which her body was only too happy to obey.

It thrilled her, this version, and it frightened her a little, too. Because sometimes—a very few sometimes—the intensity of it tipped into terrifying, the pleasure into pain, and her own reticence and inexperience into nonconsent. Her imagination carried her off, then, into the ugly realm of memory with its too-vivid screams of terror and blood.

Alex finished preening and turned to Amy. "Want to see what I _am_ wearing to the wedding?" she asked brightly.

It was some small consolation, Amy supposed, that Alex The Bride-To-Be was, in some respects, _nicer_ than Alex The Roommate.

"Sure," Amy said.

They wandered back into the dormitory, which was empty except for Fiona. She looked at them over the top of another Witch Weekly. "Oh, I bet the mirror didn't like _that_."

"Fuck the mirror." Alex busied herself rummaging through her trunk. She pulled out barely-used books and broken quills, a rather frothy-looking pink bra with little white brooms zooming endlessly across the fabric, and, finally, what looked like the beginnings of a wedding planner.

"Come see, Fiona, I'm showing Amy my wedding dress."

Fiona shot up as though her bed had suddenly caught fire and crossed over to them.

With a flourish, Alex extracted a large, gently-used photograph from the guts of the planner and held it up for them to see.

Amy's heart nearly stopped.

There, right in the center of the photograph, were her parents' friends, the young radicals whose Floo Amy accidentally ended up in, the bride and groom now destined to spend eternity in Azkaban, the infamous torturers—

"The Lestranges!" said Fiona at once, in a kind of awe.

It was a photograph of Rodolphus and Bellatrix's wedding.

"It won't be _that_ dress, obviously," Alex said, "but I saw this in Theo's house and fell in love. He's having a reproduction made for me."

"Ooh, it's beautiful," Fiona gushed.

And so it was.

The entire photograph was beautiful, as a matter of fact. One of those snapshots of a perfect moment in life. Who would have possibly guessed that these happy, untroubled people were the same ones rotting in Azkaban, decaying in graves, or else missing, presumed dead?

You couldn't have guessed it, unless you'd known them.

There was the bride and groom, of course. Rabastan was best man, a younger, happier version of Jupiter at his heels. Someone had affixed a bow-tie to his collar. She recognized Evan Rosier and Aaron Wilkies from their pictures in the paper and the memory of their seventh-year selves. They were impossibly young and handsome in their dress robes, blissfully ignorant of the future. They'd both be dead—hunted down by Aurors—in less than a year. The maid of honor was a smiling, hugely pregnant Narcissa Malfoy.

Amy wondered, if you asked Mrs. Malfoy about her sister's wedding, would she have some hilarious anecdote?

("We just threw it together, you know, in a park of all places. Our parents were furious. But they were in love…I remember Audrey Selwyn wanted to catch that bouquet so badly—she and Evan were engaged—but as soon as Bella threw it, Rabastan's dog went right after it, the beast. Well, Audrey ended up wrestling it out of his mouth! It was just divine…")

"Is that…Regulus?" Fiona asked, prodding a tall gentleman out of the way of a shorter one. The wedding party jostled about to make room for him. "I remember him when he was a 7th year."

It was. Standing right there, waving at them, was prissy little Regulus Black who used to put down his Prefect badge long enough to laugh and drink firewhisky and tell jokes that would make you go redder than the Hogwarts express.

Alex nodded. "Yeah, I noticed him right away. Hell of a Seeker, he was."

A quiet fell over the three of them suddenly, as though they just realized they weren't looking at a wedding at all, but a funeral waiting to happen. There was something sickening about it, something appalling beyond words.

"They never found his body, did they?" Fiona said after a while, still staring down at the picture.

"No, they didn't. He might still be alive," Amy said. It was impossibly childish, and she fully expected Alex to sneer that 'everyone knew' Regulus Black was dead and rotting in an unmarked grave, but that didn't happen.

Instead, Alex continued the fantasy: "Alive and hiding out somewhere safe."

"A desert island, maybe, or a tropical beach in Brazil," Amy said.

"No, Regulus hated mosquitos."

"The arctic circle, then. Nothing up there but snow and stars. He could look at the Northern Lights every day."

"Yeah…"

But Alex wasn't looking at Regulus at all, Amy suddenly realized. Her attention was entirely focused on the tall gentleman next to him, the one who had moved out of the way just a moment ago. He had a roguish sort of smile that Amy had seen many times before on Alex's face, always preceding an off-color joke.

Amy would have bet all the gold in Gringotts that tall man was Alex's uncle, Augustus Rookwood.

"It's not fair," Alex whispered.

Then, louder: "It's not fair."

Without warning, she grabbed the photograph and ripped it violently in half.

"It's not fair!" she screamed, throwing the pieces on the ground. "It's not fair! It's not FUCKING _FAIR_!"

Alex dropped to the floor and began sobbing into her hands as though she could hold the broken pieces of herself in them, if only she tried hard enough. Fiona sat next to her and began stroking her hair, which was still as green and as beautiful and as silly as ever.

And Amy?

Amy didn't know how to comfort weeping witches any better than Snape, but she was struck with a sudden idea. Maybe not an idea, but a sudden…compulsion. Without really knowing why she was doing it, Amy picked up the pieces of the photograph and wandered out to the common room.

There was a full-on argument going on amongst the leather armchairs and couches, with horrified onlookers and all. Myron seemed to be confronting another boy, some 4th-year. There was a Memoriball in Myron's hand, and an accusing finger thrust at the boy.

"Do you think this is _funny_?" Myron was demanding.

" _No!_ Don't report me—I shouldn't even have that!" the boy whined.

" _Nobody_ should have this!"

But Amy didn't have the energy to wonder, except in the most idle way, what sick fantasy could possibly be hidden in that thing to get Myron in such a mood. One friend's breakdown was enough for the day.

Allowing the argument to fade into background noise, she walked over to the message board and tacked the broken wedding party right on top of a Ministry poster that advised, _True Love Waits!_

The photograph still didn't look quite right, so she tapped it with a _Reparo!_ and watched as the broken ends knitted back together.

In doing so, she jolted the entire wedding party, and a previously unseen groomsman stumbled out of hiding and into the frame.

He'd _told_ her he had some miserable excuse for a private life—hell, she'd seen the beginning of it, when he and the other 7th-years used to sit in that very common room and laugh and drink firewhisky—so she shouldn't have been surprised when the groomsman shook a black curtain of hair out of his face and revealed himself to be Severus Snape.

He would have been just a year or two older than her. Perhaps finishing up his miserable apprenticeship, the one Abraxas Malfoy had so generously financed. The Dark Mark had already been burned on his forearm under those dress robes, probably.

It's funny, isn't it? How much can change in just a few years.

"We're going to Snape about this right now!" Myron screamed behind her, and dragged the 4th-year boy away by the wrist.

* * *

When Amy went to drop off the newest round of grading, she found Snape sitting at his desk, drunk only thirty minutes into his predictably desolate office hours.

He was slumped back in a pose of exaggerated ease, eyes closed and turned toward the ceiling; his elbow propped up on the back of his chair; his legs crossed, ankle atop knee. A nearly empty bottle of firewhisky sat before him with what seemed to be defiant purpose—as though he were just daring the Headmaster to come along and sack him on the spot. Next to the bottle, several confiscated Memoriballs teetered precariously on the edge of the desk.

Amy walked into the room and set his grading on his desk with a gentle _thunk_.

"I wondered when you'd come crawling back," he sneered through all the layers of misery and contempt that shrouded him, mummy-like, from the world's judgment. "Always crawling back. Just like a beaten dog."

Amy shoved her hands in her pockets and waited for him to finish.

"Well, what is it this time?" he asked the ceiling, eyes still closed. "Have you had some grand grammatical epiphany? Have you decided you despise flat adverbs and came rushing here to tell me they make you 'awful' angry?"

She didn't laugh, but it was still pretty funny.

"Save it, whatever it is," Snape continued. "We all know you're not well, Bartleby, there's no need to belabor the point with yet another asinine non-sequitur."

"I thought we should talk," she finally said.

"Talk," he mocked with a humorless little laugh. "And what, pray tell, would we talk—"

But he stopped short upon lowering his head. He stared at her for a moment, his eyes curiously trained on her hair, as if struggling to bring her into focus. When he succeeded in doing so, a guttural noise escaped from his throat—a noise of utter disgust.

"Good God, if you don't exist for the sole purpose of mocking me, I don't know why you're here," he spat. "Just wait until the Headmaster sees that fucking Glamour. You know, he actually had the audacity to suggest that I somehow felt guilty about the whole thing. 'Transference,' he called it. Ha!"

"And what did you tell him?" she asked. She didn't have the slightest idea what he was talking about.

"That I trust my subconscious not to fixate on such a piss-poor substitute. Such a talentless little thing you are, always staring off as if at the lining of your own coffin. You know, Bartleby, when I consider what you did to that boy, I find I can hardly believe it. I _wouldn't_ believe it, had I not witnessed the effects in all their nauseating glory."

He fixed her with a look of contempt as he finished: "You are _nothing_ like her."

There it was again, his 'miserable excuse for a private life.' Amy quirked her head and considered him. Snape the Childhood God from nearly a decade ago, the Death Eater who'd been given more power than you'd ever dreamed of having. Snape the Groomsman, the _Professor_ —and now, apparently, the Jilted Lover.

Fascinating.

Snape leaned forward in a more alert pose, placing his elbows on the desk as he did so. "Best not prolong the inevitable—what have you come here to _talk_ about?" he sneered.

"I thought we should talk about us," she said.

" _Us,_ " he mocked. "There is no _us_ , Bartleby, there is only _you._ You and your obscene schoolgirl infatuation, your cadaver kisses, and the fact that you _still_ don't look a day over sixteen."

He focused on her hair again, and his expression changed, softened, like he wasn't seeing her at all, but something—or _someone_ —else very far away. "Sixteen eternally. Somewhere, Nabokov is smiling."

"I don't think that's fair," Amy said.

His eyes slid back to hers. "To whom, Bartleby? To _you?_ Do you not think yourself a Lolita, or are you merely attempting to make me feel better about my pederasty?"

Years later, when she has actually read Nabokov, she'll change her mind about this. It _was_ fair.

Years later she'll learn that there is no "Lolita." The girl's name is "Dolores"—"Lo" for short—and "Lolita" is just the nickname given to her by a tyrant. He reduces her down to the smallest possible syllable, the smallest piece of herself, and builds a fantasy onto it. "Lolita" never existed.

Years later, she'll think that maybe "Bartleby" had never existed, either.

But as it was, Amy hadn't yet read Nabokov. She was only 18, and as she stood there facing down something she wanted desperately but was barely prepared for—something ruinous that drew her like a moth to a flame—she couldn't articulate what, exactly, wasn't fair, or to whom. So, she stayed quiet and watched as he began tracing his lips with one long, pale finger.

"Do you know what I am, I wonder?" he asked suddenly.

"I think you're a mean drunk," she said, shifting restlessly on her heels. "I think you're not making any sense. I think you won't remember any of this in the morning."

He continued as if she hadn't spoken. "Oh, I know what your housemates say—that I'm a traitor. A Death Eater. Do you have any idea what that means? The things I've seen? The things I've _done_?"

She licked her lips, suddenly dry-mouthed. This wasn't going at all like she'd imagined. "What are you trying to tell me, Snape?"

"I am attempting to make you understand that I am not _safe_ , Bartleby. Whatever it is you think of me—however much I may have every appearance of being the Headmaster's hostage, I have not been castrated by him. He does not, as your Housemates are so fond of saying, keep my todger in a box. Neither has he removed my teeth to prevent me biting the lambs."

She began to protest. "I didn't think—"

"You did. You do. Else you would not be here. If you want someone _safe_ to teach you, to help you rediscover your damaged sexuality—and that is what you want, make no mistake—go find some unsuspecting Hufflepuff. I've no interest in it."

His words probably would have been hurtful—or more hurtful, anyway—had he not already spent the entire year insulting her. She'd long ago decided that his anger had nothing to do with her, personally, so what was one more barb from a whiskey-drowned tongue? Especially from a fellow prisoner serving out his own probation? And then there was the fact, too, the fact that…

It occurred to her suddenly in a tiny flare of realization. He'd always made it seem like _she_ was the one pursuing him, forever standing outside his door and haunting his corridors.

But what if he wanted it just as badly as she did?

Hadn't he admitted as much, with his Nabokov reference?

There was a potent headiness to it, the idea of being desired.

"Then why am I here?" she asked quietly.

"Don't ask me to divine motivations that you yourself—"

"I'm not asking about my motivations," she interrupted softly. "I'm asking about _yours_. Why am I _still_ here, when you have always had the choice to simply ward your door and refuse to answer when I knock?"

Snape smirked at her then, rather as you might smirk at an opponent who'd seen through your latest ploy. His contempt suddenly seemed to vanish, his intoxication to sober, and he leaned back in his chair again, which slid out from behind his desk and allowed her a fuller view of him. His pose radiated wiry strength, legs parted in a masculine spread, arms folded across his chest. His eyes slid from the top of her strawberry blonde hair to the tips of her toes, then back up again in one long, lingering sweep. He looked at her like she was something displayed in a window, something he might buy.

It was an invitation.

No.

A _challenge_.

The fabric under her hands felt supple when she joined him behind the desk and placed her hands tentatively on his shoulders. Surprisingly supple. But the muscles underneath were hard, tense and almost quivering, when she braced herself and leaned forward.

He tasted like smoke and spice—it was the firewhisky still lingering in his mouth, and it wasn't unpleasant. Neither was it unpleasant when he placed his hands on her waist, or when he drew her lower lip between his teeth and bit it gently. A soft moan escaped her mouth, and a warm glow began somewhere lower.

She'd experienced kisses before. Good kisses, even. But never had one of them caused this kind of swooping sensation in her stomach, this kind of thrilling spark in her brain. That seemed to be a talent particular to him, Severus Snape.

Before she had a chance to analyze that too much, he'd separated his lips from hers and buried them instead in her neck with a fevered groan that tightened her nipples and sent a delicious shiver up her spine. The kisses and nips began just _there_ , in the spot where her neck met her shoulder, and began trailing up the white column of her throat until she tipped her chin toward the ceiling, eyes closed, and arched into his touch with a whimper.

Amy's grip tightened on his shoulders as he murmured something guttural and wanton into her ear, something formless and tingling. The hands that had been clutching at her waist slid lower to cup her bum, and in one swift motion he was standing, lifting her up, and seating her on his desk, his legs nestled between her open thighs.

She gasped at the sudden movement, opened her eyes, and found his eyes locked to hers. They were glittering obsidian sparks in the dungeon gloom. She didn't make the conscious decision to _beg_ , but she found herself doing it anyway.

"Please," she whispered, her voice strange and husky to her own ears. "I want—I want—"

"Yes?" he queried, his gaze intense, unwavering, and the word slightly breathless.

In answer, she hooked a hand behind his neck and pulled him to her as she moved to lay back on the desk. He supported her back with one arm, and with the other swept the contents of his desk impatiently to the floor so she had a clean surface on which to rest. Her painstakingly-graded essays fluttered to the floor with a feathery whisper, like a bird taking flight, and several Memoriballs shattered against the stone floor. Their ghostly contents—some memory-substance like wind made solid—swirled upward around them.

Then Amy found her back pressed against the hard surface of the desk, and Snape's face was buried in her neck again, his hands restlessly moving, exploring. One hand began at her knee and slithered forward across the sensitive skin of her inner thigh. The other hand snuck under the front of her blouse where it had become untucked, traced the lines of her ribs, and cupped her breast.

He planted kisses up the line of her jaw, then began positively _attacking_ her mouth with an almost savage intensity, sending her head spinning, spinning, _spinning_.

Something hard and clothed grazed along her thigh and pressed _there_ , against her damp knickers. His cock, she realized with a start. The spinning in her head became dizzying, intoxicating, and tinged with a strange cresting panic—a subtle buzz of energy, the warning kind that precedes accidental magic.

Amy jerked her head to the side, breaking their connection.

"Wait," she gasped softly. "Sto—"

But before she'd even finished the word—before she'd even really decided if she _did_ want it to stop—he'd withdrawn. He took one swift step back immediately and stood there three feet away in self-contained stillness, his hair disheveled and fallen around his face, his robes rumpled where she'd crushed them under her hands. There was uncharacteristic color in his cheeks—pale pink spots on his cheekbones.

His hands raised slightly in diffidence, palms open, like a hostage negotiator showing he had no weapon.

"All right," he said smoothly. Placatingly. "All right."

Amy slid off the desk, holding the hem of her skirt down as she did so, breathing hard through her nose. Already his jibe about her 'damaged sexuality' was buzzing like a wasp across her brain, threatening to sting. And she had no idea how to explain that, really, she hadn't wanted him to _stop_.

She'd only wanted him to _pause_.

But it felt too late to say that now, even if she'd known how, so she looked away from him and began to pull her appearance together. There were words for a woman who left a man with a raging erection like this, ugly ones she'd heard in the Common Room.

Bitch.

Cocktease.

Whether he thought these things of _her_ , she had no idea.

The need to say _something_ —to apologize, even—tingled on her tongue.

"I just…" she began.

"You don't owe me anything, Bartleby," he interrupted quietly. And there was something so disarming in his tone that her eyes snapped to his face.

Snape then did something very strange.

He reached toward her tentatively and, in an oddly tender gesture, tucked her hair behind her ear. The calloused pad of his thumb grazed down her cheek as he withdrew. Then he opened his mouth and asked the very last question she'd been expecting.

"Wherever did you learn the spell?"

"I'm sorry?" she breathed.

"The Entrail-Expelling Curse," he said. "Surely, with your grades, you're not in the habit of spending your leisure time poring over the Restricted Section, searching for obscure Dark spells?"

No, of course not. That was something _he_ did as a student, not her.

Amy had to think a moment about this. It was like trying to remember the exact moment you learned that two plus two equals four, or that murder was wrong, or that nice girls don't get drunk and wander about after dark, dressed like sluts. Then, slowly, the memory of a pleasant day by the lake with her cousins came to her.

"Fishing," she said finally. "It's for fishing."

A look of curious disbelief crossing his features.

"They're already dead," she clarified. "It's just to...to gut them. So you don't have to pick little bones out of your dinner later."

"Fishing," he repeated to himself. He made it sound like a nonsense word, the kind babies use before they've learned to speak.

That's when he laughed.

Actually _laughed._

It was that same, desperately ironic laugh she'd first heard outside Malfoy manor. As if something about what she'd said set off an inside joke which only he was privy to.

"You!" he said, shaking his head in amusement. "You are the single most depressing person I have ever had the misfortune to meet, and yet everything you touch becomes absurd. How absurd that I should still like to fuck you! Perhaps one day I shall, and perhaps that too shall be absurd."

He then made a shooing motion at her, rather like one would dismiss an endearing but badly-behaved dog. "Now go away, Bartleby, before we both of us choke on your absurdity."

* * *

Amy's roommate, Fiona, felt that the loo was a place of sacred female companionship. It was a refuge away from the world of men—really, the world at large—where witches could get together and observe the holy rituals of gossip and sisterly commiseration. Sometimes, after a particularly large meal, Fiona even prayed to the porcelain god.

Amy, on the other hand, felt that the loo was for peeing.

Shitting, too.

If you were lucky.

Amy, presently, was _not_ lucky. She could neither shit nor piss. She could do neither because Fiona had interrupted her, mid-stream, in order to have a little chat through the stalls about the upcoming Easter holiday.

" _I'll_ be staying here, of course—lots of studying to do," chirped Fiona. "But _you're_ going home, right?"

Pointedly ignoring the implication that she, Amy, was free to leave the Castle because burn-outs like her did _not_ have studying to do, Amy stared at the spot on her thigh where the curse scar still marred her flesh and made a noncommittal noise.

"That's nice," said Fiona magnanimously. "You seem like you could do with a holiday."

Amy absently ran her palm over the scar as she listened to Fiona finish peeing, flush, leave the stall, and begin washing her hands.

"I wish _I_ could go home. But there's just too much to do with my senior project. It's coming along nicely, you know," Fiona was saying over the sound of rushing water.

It was apparently too much to hope that Fiona might, you know, _leave_ upon the conclusion of her business.

"I even got to sit in on the last meeting for the Hogwarts Board of Governors."

"Fiona, I'm—ah—I'm a little busy just at the moment," Amy said.

The sound of splashing water ceased as Fiona finished washing her hands. "Oh, I don't mind," she said.

Amy squeezed her hand over her curse scar, nails digging into her thigh, and suppressed a groan while Fiona prattled on.

"Of course, it wasn't a _full_ meeting of the Governors. They can't really do anything until the vacant seat is filled, but still. You know, I was even telling Slughorn that he should run for the seat," Fiona said.

" _Slughorn_?" Amy blurted out. She was appalled to hear the hurt in her own voice. Slughorn had ignored Amy's letter but answered _Fiona's_?

Jesus. How humiliating.

"Oh yeah," Fiona responded. "We owl all the time, didn't you know? I guess _you_ don't really keep in touch with him though, do you?"

Amy squeezed her scar harder and imagined punching Fiona in the nose.

"It must be nice to have all that free time," Fiona continued, her every syllable dripping with false envy. "I feel like I spend half my life answering Slughorn's letters. He just sends so _many_ of them!"

Amy seethed silently.

"Of course, nobody can run for the empty Governor's seat until they get someone on the advisory board to nominate them. I told Slughorn, all he needs is one—just one—advisor to nominate him before the end of the term, then it'll go to the public for a snap election."

" _Fascinating_ ," Amy snarled by way of a response.

"Hmm. Well, I'd better go," Fiona said, apparently bored with tormenting her Housemate. And then, on apparent afterthought, "Oh, and Amy?"

"What?" Amy snapped.

"I almost forgot. Professor Snape told me to tell you something."

Amy's heart jumped in her throat and her nails dug into the flesh of her leg. "Tell me _what_?"

"He wants you in his office tomorrow morning, before you leave for home. He said to be there at 11:30, and not to be late, as he's _very busy_."

"Busy doing what?" Amy wondered aloud.

"He's probably slicing Tremlett into tiny pieces for a potion." Fiona dropped her voice to those gossipy, conspiratorial tones she was known for. "Apparently the dumb kid had something _very_ nasty on one of those Memoriballs."

"I don't know why those bother him so much," said Amy, who absolutely refused to give Fiona the pleasure of asking what 'nasty' thing Tremlett had in his Memoriball. "They're just fantasies."

Alex's words, straight out of Amy's mouth.

"Hmm. Well, whatever it was, Snape's been on the rampage about it. He even had the Prefects search the boys' dorms for more. I wouldn't go pissing him off if I were you."

Amy thought again about the words for girls who started sexual encounters they couldn't finish. Words like "slut" and "damaged goods." She somehow doubted it was Tremlett's Memoriball that had Snape in such a foul mood. Although...

Well.

Who knew with him, anyway?

"Well?" said Fiona expectantly, jolting Amy out of her reverie. "Why are you supposed to meet Snape tomorrow? What's he want?"

"To fuck me."

It felt good to say that out loud.

Fiona laughed. "Ugh, I know, right? He's such a _fucker._ Gave me a 'P' on my last paper. Graded it and then fucked it right in the arse."

In reality, it was Amy who'd graded the paper and fucked in in the arse, but that hardly mattered at this point.

"Oh, Amy?"

"What, Fiona?"

"I saw a box of chocolate frogs on your bedside table earlier."

"You can have one. I don't care." Amy would have given Fiona her left tit just to make her leave.

"No, no, I don't want one...But, all the same...Maybe you should give them to someone else. It's just a lot of empty calories, you know? No offense," Fiona said.

And, with that last insult, the door swung shut behind her.

Amy finally let go of her thigh and looked down. Highlighted by her own red handprint, the faded and barely-legible word "WHORE" glared back.

She wondered what Snape would have to say about how the Dittany treatments were progressing, then punched the door of the stall so hard she split her knuckle.


	8. The Ferret and the Crow

**The Ferret and the Crow**

Diagon Alley was crowded.

The street stretched and curved out of sight, packed with open businesses and shoppers busy examining wares, haggling with store-owners, chatting with their friends. Unminded children ran and played, stopping only to press their noses to the store windows, where Easter displays exploded with pastel colors and promises of chocolate-dipped joy. No shuttered doors, no air of furtive hurriedness, no urgency to get the chores done and return to the safety of home. Where others had, only a year or two ago, felt the presence of War here, Amy felt its absence.

It was just as keen, just as uncomfortable, as her parent's absence.

Again.

"It's kind of funny, if you think about it," she said suddenly.

Professor Snape didn't look as though he found anything about their current situation—waiting, once again, for her parents to collect her—funny.

"Anyone who's a parent has been late at least once," she pressed on.

Snape checked his pocket watch in pointed silence and ignored her. Given his capacity to ignore her very existence, it shouldn't have been surprising that he could simply pretend he hadn't told her, less than two weeks ago, how absurd it was that he wanted to fuck her.

That's fine. Amy's good at pretending, too.

She could pretend they weren't hurling toward something together—something forbidden and inexorable. It would come, just not today. Not in this sunshine, where ambiguity and doubt could not thrive.

"That's how parenthood starts," she told him. "Somebody is late. You know— _Late_?"

Haha, get it? _Late_? As in, one's period being late?

Whatever. Snape didn't get it, either. It wasn't very funny, anyway.

He put his watch away and stared at her expectantly, his eyes pinning her with that merciless, unblinking scrutiny which was his specialty. It was the kind of stare that made her squirm. She wished he'd say something. _Anything_ , even if it wasn't about _them_.

"You might even say parenthood is _defined_ by lateness..." Amy concluded lamely.

"You're accustomed to making excuses for them, aren't you?" Snape said. It wasn't a question.

Amy thought about his dusty kitchen, his severely neglected cat, his whatever-it-was that he would be attending to if he didn't have to remand juvenile delinquents back to the custody of their parents—a courtesy, if you recall, done at his convenience.

Or else just another condition of his probation.

"You can just leave me here," Amy told him. "They'll be along eventually."

Snape's eyes narrowed in scorn, as though the idea of her being unsupervised and entirely responsible for herself for a single afternoon was very ridiculous indeed. "I don't think so."

"Then just Apparate me home. They're probably there, sleeping in or something," she said.

He sighed again and put on a lecturing tone, the one he used when explaining something to an especially stupid first-year: "My time away from Hogwarts is extremely limited. I have errands to attend, appointments to keep, and my life does not come to a stand-still simply because I am burdened with you. Mind yourself and follow."

Amy did.

The first place they stopped was just down the road. At first it appeared to her to be an ordinary Diagon Alley bookstore, one crowded with dusty bookshelves and stuffed to the brim with dubiously-organized scrolls. Then she peered through the propped-open door and squinted at the titles. Each and every one was academic in nature, including a vast array of scholarly journals. There were heaps of _Transfiguration Today_ , stacks of _Challenges in Charms_ , and piles of _The Practical Potioneer._

Was he...Was he submitting a paper for publication or something?

"Or something," Snape said mockingly, now entering the building and wasting no time in ringing the bell on the counter.

She hadn't realized she'd said it aloud.

When, exactly, had he found the time to publish? Somewhere in the scant moments between drinking and slicing Tremlett into tiny pieces and carrying on an illicit affair with his TA?

When no proprietor showed up after a minute, Snape rang the bell again and then began drumming his fingers on the counter. When a minute more passed, he muttered irritably about the unacceptable tardiness of other people, produced a sealed envelope from a pocket far too small to contain it, and shoved it in her hands. He then swept past her to the door, a cigarette appearing magically between his thin lips.

He spoke around it just before exiting the store: "Find someone to give that to and then meet me outside."

The door jingled shut behind him, and she watched through the window as he lit the cigarette with the tip of his wand.

Everything—absolutely everything—was a power play with him.

By dragging her along on this trip instead of leaving her be, he made it abundantly clear that her priorities, comfort, and general well-being were less important to him than his _errands._ By delegating his errands to her, he then made it clear that his errands weren't even important enough to personally attend. _Ergo_ , she, Amy, was a thing of such unbelievable unimportance it was a wonder she managed to exist at all.

The insult of it all made her head swim. It was still swimming when she located the (apparently very deaf) proprietor behind a stack of books on Herbology theory. She was a thin, grey-haired old witch who seemed to be the very embodiment of the word "venerable."

"I've been looking forward to this," she shouted at Amy, smiling and opening Snape's envelope. "We'll get it reviewed and let you know via owl in the next few weeks—best of luck to you!"

"Uh-huh," said Amy, barely listening.

Snape dragged her to the Apothecary in Knockturn Alley after that, where he purchased some potions' ingredients of dubious legality. Then it was back to Diagon Alley, where he picked up a new quill, and then, on what appeared to be impulse, two chocolate Easter eggs. He passed one to her without comment, rather like one might reward a dog that had behaved itself very well.

"Woof, woof," she said under her breath, and watched out of the corner of her eye as he rolled his eyes, sighed, and checked his pocket watch for the millionth time that hour.

"I've a lunch appointment," Snape said, after he'd finished his sweet. "If your miserable progenitors haven't shown up by the time it's over, I'm taking you back to Hogwarts."

Then they sat at a table on Fortescue's sunny patio—or, rather, Amy tried to sit at his table, but he only pointed moodily to a different table, rather like he were directing a chess piece, and Amy sat there instead.

There had once been a time when she would have killed for the chance to spend a day with her childhood god, to follow him to deserted graveyards and secret meetings and watch him rid the world of the Mudbloods and Muggle-Borns and Trash that threatened their way of life.

But that was years ago, and this was now, April 25th, 1983, and there were no mysterious midnight meetings—only his 'miserable excuse for a private life' with its papers to publish and appointments to keep. 1983, and Amy had developed a most convenient apathy and a most amazing talent for tuning out. She didn't bother trying to eavesdrop. In fact, she didn't even bother trying to stay awake.

Instead, she sat and ate her Easter egg. The afternoon sun was warm and comfortable, and a lazy breeze brought spring smells to her nose—cherry blossoms, and pollen. Under the influence of this pleasant environment, plus the mild sedative effect of the chocolate, she began to feel very sleepy and stupid and compliant. She put her head on the table, let the general white noise of Diagon Alley fill her ears, and, before Snape's lunch appointment even got there, began to doze.

She dreamt of the winter night Rabastan's dog led her to the door. She saw the disemboweled corpse of that unfortunate garden gnome spread at St. Francis' feet like a sacrifice, but it wasn't alone this time. This time, a pure white ferret and a crow, black as death, were feasting on its entrails.

"He left a note," said the ferret around a mouthful of blood.

"And? His usual oratorical senility?" the crow drawled, sounding bored.

" 'I watched, my son, as the greatest minds of a generation were wasted…wizards fell from grace…Pureblood maidens defiled' so, yes, his usual oratorical senility," said the ferret. He paused, then—"You were mentioned."

"A great, wasted mind?" asked the crow.

The ferret looked shrewdly at his companion. "He called you a traitor."

"You have your gold, Lucius, and your name. I have only my tale of deepest remorse. We do what we must to survive."

"Is that what you call this, Severus? Surviving?"

"What would you have me say?" asked the crow with a touch of impatience. "That it was my deepest ambition to _teach_? That I don't find it tedious beyond measure? It wasn't. I do. Hogwarts is dull, but it keeps me in employment and out of Azkaban."

"Dull? I should send you a copy of Father's letter. He went from abusing you into a veritable treatise on the decline of the school under Dumbledore. Apparently he resigned from the School Board last year in protest. You wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you?

"This must have been a very lengthy suicide note."

"He'd probably been writing it for days," said the ferret bitterly. "Merlin, he might even still be _alive_ if that miserable house-elf had done its job and contacted me at the first sign of such behavior."

"If only we all had house-elves to kill our fathers and save us the trouble of doing it ourselves."

The ferret gave his companion a withering look. "A man doesn't simply abandon his Governorship after three decades without reason, Severus."

The crow tutted impatiently. "Is that why you're here? for your father's empty seat? You are aware that those are _elected_ positions, not passed from father to son by divine right? I have absolutely no interest in your—or anyone else's—campaign for school governor."

"I suppose that's why you're on the advisory board charged with nominating a candidate?" said the ferret. "Your lack of interest?"

"As it so happens, yes. I signed up for the advisory board because it excuses me from nearly a half-dozen staff meetings, and if I am forced to hear my idiotic colleagues prattle on about the importance of learning _with_ the student one more time, I may well drown myself in the shower."

"One would think, if you really despised Hogwarts so much, you'd stop signing yourself up for extra responsibilities: the Advisory Board, and whoever in God's name that is over there," the Ferret said, nodding at something in the distance.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," the crow replied indifferently.

"Oh? Am I to believe we _just so happen_ to be sitting next to some random Slytherin teenager sleeping in the sun?"

"Believe whatever you'd like, Lucius. You always have."

"Isn't that the girl who laughed at my father's funeral?"

"I'm not at liberty to say."

The ferret sighed and looked back at his companion. "You're evading, Severus, I asked about the incident that prompted my father's resignation."

"I can't speak to that, either," said the crow from atop St. Francis' head.

"If Dumbledore has hushed something up, I want to know about it. The public deserves to know about it. In fact, the lack of transparency at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizard—"

The crow interrupted. "Save your stump speech for an interested audience, Lucius. I don't want it."

"So what do you want? For me to pay for your tea while you bore me with bad conversation?"

"Ah, yes. Bad conversation. That's the trouble with Non-Disclosure Enchantments," drawled the crow drily. "They ruin conversation."

The ferret suddenly looked very interested indeed. "An NDE? So the Ministry got involved? This must have been quite the scandal."

The crow grabbed a large mouthful of Gnome in its beak and half-hopped, half-flew to the top of St. Francis' head. It then tossed its head in the air and let gravity drop something red and bloody—a kidney, maybe—down its gullet. It wiped its bill on its feet before answering:

"Incident—scandal—outrage—what does it matter? Whatever it was, it was killed in its crib. Your father was well aware of that—do you really desire to spend your time chasing his white whale?"

The ferret cracked a large bone and began sucking the marrow out of it. "Why don't you let me decide how I want to spend my time."

In answer, the crow nosed through the guts at its feet, searching for some choice part. It plucked something out of the mass—an organ so perfectly red, so perfectly shiny, and so perfectly round that it looked almost like a Christmas bauble. He tossed it to the ferret, who caught it in a distressingly human paw.

"Where did you get this?" said the ferret, turning the weird little organ in its paws. "This looks like it came from an Auror evidence room."

The crow tossed an errant rib off St. Francis' head. "The Auror evidence room has its share of disgruntled employees, I'm sure. And such things are known to find their way into the black market. I confiscated this one from a student."

"Won't there be some sort of secrecy charm on it? An Anonymity Enchantment?"

"Anything is possible, Lucius."

"Can't you tell me who's in this? A surname, at least?"

The crow gave him a pointed look. "I'd prefer not to."

The ferret scoffed irritably. "My 'White Whale'? You'd 'prefer not to'? You and my father both with your Melville references…If I never have to hear the words 'Moby dick' or ' _Bartleby the Scriven_ —'" But it broke off, as though a thought had just occurred to it. Its eyes flicked to something in the distance, then back to the crow.

The crow wiped its beak again and began preening the feathers on its chest.

"I see," the ferret finally said, its sharp little teeth bared in a horrid smile.

"Took you long enough," the crow returned irritably.

They both gobbled on the gnome corpse for a few more minutes. After a while, though, the crow looked up, blood dripping from its beak

"Bartleby!" It rasped. "Bartleby—wake up!"

It was her own magic, more than the dream, that woke Amy up. It surged through her with an instinctive kind of panic, starting at the tips of her toes and fingers, rising up across her arms, legs, and torso, and concentrated in her right shoulder, where it snapped like a small bolt of lightning. She sat up with a highly undignified noise, disoriented and oddly groggy, and looked up just in time to see Snape withdraw his hand from her shoulder as though burned.

Oh. He'd been shaking her awake.

They were alone at Fortescue's now, and the light seemed lower in the sky—lower than she'd expected, because she didn't think she'd been asleep that long. Amy had the sense that she'd been dreaming something important, something about a ferret and a crow, but even as the details slid out of her memory forever, she caught sight of Snape's hand.

There was a deep gash across his palm, and it was dripping blood.

Oh. Had she done that?

His eyes flicked from the cut to her face, and there was something strange in his look, something oddly tender. Something full of regret. But it was gone so quickly she might have just imagined it.

Still, he seemed distracted as he cast the healing charm, and although he insulted her ("And to think you're failing Defense!") his heart didn't really seem in it. She opened her mouth to apologize, but was interrupted by a voice calling her name from down the street. She looked past Snape to see her parents waving at her, and when she blinked he was gone.

* * *

Amy spent most of the Easter Holiday fighting with her parents.

Her report card—such as it was—came with a school owl while she sat at the kitchen table, tipping food on the floor for the Inexplicable Dog. She tried a bit of salami first, but the Dog merely sniffed at it unenthusiastically before putting his head back down on the floor with a sigh that reminded her of Snape's.

What was it about ex-Death Eaters and food? Even their dogs wouldn't eat.

Her mum was saying things about her "plans for the future."

Amy tried tipping a slice of fruit to the Dog, just on the off chance he was a vegetarian or something, but he just looked at it. Out of nowhere, she got the mental image of Snape, in full Death Eater regalia, peeling a banana, and struggled to hold onto the gravity of her reality.

Her father said something about her "potential."

"Sorry," Amy told the Dog.

"Amy, look at me—Look at me, please," her mother was saying.

Reluctantly, Amy did.

"We know this has been a difficult year for you—we _know_. But you have _got_ to start applying yourself. There is so much at stake, and there's still time to turn things around." The desperation in her mother's voice was depressing.

Guilty, Amy looked back at the Dog and pushed a cracker from her plate onto the floor, which was now littered with uneaten morsels.

Her mother made an exasperated noise then and began yelling: "Do you have any idea the strings we had to pull to get you back on the list to take the NEWTs? You're a smart girl—I mean, _Jesus_ , how hard is it to just go to class!?"

"Well, they still count you 'absent' if you're late," Amy explained quietly. "It's just hard to be on time sometimes." She looked up at her parents and held their gaze. "I mean—you know what that's like. Being late. Three hours late, even."

Her mother recoiled as if slapped, a look of shock on her face. Amy's father, overcome with a sudden need to check on the Gentleman Trees, simply got up and walked out the back door. The Dog bolted up and followed him out.

"Amy," Mum began, her voice choked with emotion. "You can't hold that over us forever…"

Amy looked out the kitchen window at her father, who sat on a dilapidated garden bench and began to weep. The Dog alternated between scanning the horizon and investigating Gnome holes, as though Rabastan were liable to just pop out of one any day now.

"You have to _try_ , Amy. God knows _we'r_ e trying…." Amy's mum said.

"Are you, though?," Amy wondered. The calmness in her own voice surprised her. "Last year—I get it. You weren't expecting...Well, you know. But the first day of Easter holiday? You were supposed to pick me up at _noon_. I had to wander around Diagon Alley with Snape for, like, two hours. It doesn't exactly make a person feel wanted."

Amy's mum made a face in confusion. "What are you talking about, Amy? His owl said two o'clock. We were there at one fifty-five."

Amy didn't believe her, so she went looking for the note later. When she found it, she saw that, indeed, her mother had been right. Amy frowned at the words "Two O'clock," right there on the parchment in Snape's spidery hand. Plain as day.

It didn't seem like him to make a mistake like that. He did everything with such anal-attentive deliberation, and he was so God-damned insistent on punctuality. He wouldn't get an appointment off by two hours any more than he would just haphazardly toss a random ingredient into a cauldron. Which—absurd as it seemed—could only mean that he'd contrived to spend a whole two hours with her, running errands and keeping appointments.

_What are you up to, Snape?_

Then she remembered his piles of undone grading, his drinking, the fact that he couldn't be bothered to approve anyone's Senior Project last year. Hell, he hadn't even updated the Common Room password since January.

"Whatever," she told the Dog, and dismissed the matter.

* * *

The paper airplane came at night.

It was the first night back from Easter Holidays, and Amy hadn't been asleep. She'd been sitting in the bath, thumbing through her now very well-worn copy of _Bartleby_. The tub in the girl's dorm wasn't very _nice_ – there was nothing noteworthy in its size or shape or style. But the water was warm and, thanks to a bath potion stolen from Fiona's trunk, pleasantly lemon-scented. The water hugged every intimate place on Amy's body.

It felt…good.

Not precisely sexual, but not bad, either. She'd forgotten all those gentle little sensations, forgotten that her skin itself could feel good. She couldn't help imaging that the water gently lapping around her body was Snape's hand.

Amy was thinking about this, while simultaneously reading, when the paper airplane floated in, poked her in the head, and unfurled itself before her eyes.

**NEWT Care of Magical Creatures Students,**

**Emergency class on the north side of the lake. Come immediately** — **you won't want to miss this.**

**Prof. S. Kettleburn.**

She frowned. How odd. She'd never heard of anything like an emergency, unscheduled class before - certainly not one in the middle of the night.

She considered ignoring it and staying in the warm comfort of the bath. But then, curiosity piqued, she removed herself, cast a Drying Charm, and pulled on what Alex disapprovingly called her "Muggle-Style" pajamas. She wandered out of the loo, found shoes and a cloak, and opened her mouth to wake her roommates.

Then she remembered how bitchy they could be, especially first thing after waking up, and closed it again. Shrugging to herself, she padded quietly out the door and began the long walk to the north lawn.

Amy saw the cluster of people before she saw what they were clustered around. There, at the edge of the lake, was a peg-legged figure instantly recognizable as Kettleburn, three pajama-clad students—presumably Ravenclaws from class—and, kneeling, the huge mass of the Gamekeeper, whom Amy had never once spoken to.

She began to speak just a few metres from them. "What're we doing ou…"

But the words died on her lips when she saw it.

A dragon.

A dragon whelp—maybe 10 or 15 feet long from snout to tail—lay crumpled on the North lawn. It's great black wings were ragged and folded at awkward angles. It breathed heavily, its scaled chest heaving in the moonlight, clearly injured, or ill, or both.

"What's wrong with it?" she murmured.

"Poachers," Kettleburn said simply. "See the claws? The horns?—" he pointed them out "—They've been cut. Both fetch a good price in Knockturn Alley. They were probably about to harvest its heartstrings and liver, thinking it dead, when it woke and escaped."

"How—How would they have even caught it?" one of the Ravenclaws whispered.

"Look at its eyes," Kettleburn said, pointing.

Amy followed his finger to the creature's eyes, which were an angry red, and swollen almost shut.

"Conjunctivitis Curse?" she asked.

Kettleburn nodded. "A Conjunctivitis Curse to initially subdue it, and then something...Darker."

"Darker?" the Ravenclaw repeated. "What do you mean, like Dark Magic?" He sounded frightened.

"Indeed. It would have taken an extraordinary powerful curse—and a powerful wizard—to bring down even a fledgling dragon."

"What _kind_ of curse?" another Ravenclaw wanted to know.

"That, I'm afraid, is rather outside my purview, Mr. Fawcett," Kettleburn said mournfully. "We're waiting on Professors Dumbledore and Snape to consult."

"It couldn't have been... _Him_ , could it? He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named?" whispered Fawcett. He sounded mildly hysterical now, and dark tense whispers broke out among the other students.

"Let's not let our imaginations run away with us," said Kettleburn chided gently. "It's only an injured dragon."

"What about Death Eaters? Could it have been some of them?" piped up another Ravenclaw.

But Kettleburn had suddenly turned away from his students and was waving his illuminated wand at two dark figures in the distance. "Ho! Speak of the devil! We're over here, Headmaster, Professor."

Amy looked over to find two people swiftly crossing the lawn—A tall figure instantly recognizable as the Headmaster, and, next to him, a shorter wizard with billowing black robes.

Snape.

She crossed her arms over her breasts, suddenly feeling very under-dressed indeed.

His eyes met hers for just a fraction of a second, once he and Dumbledore had reached the party, but then he immediately turned his attention to Kettleburn.

All three wizards walked over to the dragon and began examining it, consulting in low whispers. She caught snippets of information here and there—Hagrid had found it, alerted Kettleburn, who saw at once that it was badly injured. Once these facts were settled, Snape crouched on his heels gargoyle-like, and began waving his wand over the dragon, muttering various diagnosis spells as he did so. The moonlight slanted against his hair, drawing his face in chiaroscuro.

Years later, she'll still be struck by how he'd seemed to fit right in there, with the darkness of that moment.

Finally, after what felt like eons, Snape lowered his wand and, in an odd gesture she'd never seen before, quirked his head. Then he was straightening, standing, talking to Dumbledore and Kettleburn. She caught snippets again—names of Dark curses she'd never heard of, suggestions that perhaps Madam Pomfrey should be consulted, wondering aloud whether it wouldn't be kinder to just put the beast out of its misery (this last drew a sob from the gamekeeper).

Finally, Dumbledore nodded. "Quite right, quite right. Well, thank you all the same, Severus."

Dumbledore and Snape turned back to the waiting students while Kettleburn stayed behind, his hands shoved deep into his pockets as he looked mournfully down at the creature

The Headmaster caught Amy's eye suddenly, for the first time in her recollection, and for a moment his blue eyes pierced her, searching and unfriendly. Then he smiled. "Nice to see you in class, Miss Scrivener, even one as unconventional as this."

She hugged her cloak closer. "Yes, sir."

"I trust your term is going well?"

She nodded at her feet.

Dumbledore then did something very odd as he walked by her. He moved as if to touch her shoulder—casually, in passing. It appeared to be unconscious, as he'd already begun to abandon the gesture when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Snape twitch.

Literally _twitch_ , the way a jealous child might if someone else approached his favorite toy.

"Scrivener, to me," he barked suddenly. Then, as if by afterthought, "You too, Fawcett, Shepard, Bones. It's late. We're going back to the Castle."

Dumbledore smiled enigmatically, then turned back to Kettleburn and the dragon while Snape escorted the students away from the scene.

Snape and Amy walked side by side, their hands almost brushing against one another.

Almost.

Behind them, the Ravenclaws babbled excitedly.

"Golly, a dragon! I've never seen one so close before," one of them said, apparently unable to contain himself. "Do you think it'll live, Professor?"

"I've really no idea, Shepherd," Snape responded indifferently as they crossed the lawn.

"Did I hear Dumbledore say something about Madam Pomfrey? Will she try to heal it?"

"Perhaps."

"You really don't think it could have been Death Eaters who brought it down, do you?" another Ravenclaw asked as they entered the Castle.

The complete lack of irony in his voice made Amy wonder if he had even the least idea who he was talking to.

But Snape had already come to a halt before a set of staircases and pointed a long, thin finger to the one Amy had often seen Ravenclaws ascend after dinner. "To your rooms. Don't dawdle."

The Ravenclaws trailed reluctantly up the staircase with muttered "Goodnight's"

Amy and her professor watched them go, then descended the other staircase, toward Slytherin territory. She felt suddenly very awake, hyper-aware of the sharp sound of Snape's boots against the stone steps, the dewy grass smell still clinging to him, and the fact that he was, as ever, fully dressed despite the late hour.

Perhaps he never slept.

She wondered what nightmares kept him up.

They turned a corner at the bottom of the staircase, then stopped before the door Amy knew to be his private quarters. The silence between them stretched on just a beat too long.

Finally, Snape's arms folded over his wiry chest. "Dormitory's that way," he said curtly, indicating with a dip of his head.

"I know," Amy breathed. She tipped her head toward him, watching, waiting for him to tell her to get the fuck out of his sight.

He didn't.

But neither did he approach her, or invite her in, or do anything but level an expectant gaze at her. The intent hung heavily, somehow both awkward and thrilling, between them.

Amy remembered how she'd left him last, with his raging erection and drunken declaration that he'd like to fuck her, and thought that maybe—just maybe—she was beginning to understand how this worked.

Maybe he was waiting for her to make the first move.

Tentatively, every nerve agitated and drawn and ready to spring, she took a step toward him and raised a hand to graze along the stubble of his jaw. His arms fell to his side, then to her waist, and, quite suddenly, his thin lips were upon hers again.

His kiss was deep and lingering and soft, no longer tinged with firewhisky. She felt his tongue move along the seam of her lips, then sneak forward to dip briefly into the heat of her mouth. It was like a dance—or an exploration—tentative, testing, teasing.

The stiffness in her spine melted as their tongues slanted against one another, and she became aware of other sensations—her feet, anchored to a ground that seemed suddenly quivering and unsteady; a dull, exquisite ache slowly growing in her womb; the feel of his hands clutched around her waist, pulling.

He began walking backward, murmuring something—a spell, perhaps—against her mouth, so that they melted together through the solid wood of his door.

Amy gasped in surprise at the sensation of his magic coiling around her and the realization that she now stood in her Potions Professor's sitting room, of all places.

Alone with him.

She's been here before, of course. She's even done... _things_ with him here, before. But that was different, somehow. There was no pretense this time.

And she didn't care.

She became aware of Snape studying her, as if waiting for something. His left eyebrow quirked upward minutely.

"Yes," she whispered to him. And then, with more conviction, "Yes."

A fevered groan escaped his mouth; his hands tightened on her waist, and he was walking backward again, pulling her with him, until the backs of his knees hit the couch and he sat, pulling her down on top of him.

Amy found herself straddling him, gasping as she felt it again—his erection, pressed tightly to her center through their clothes

His _erection_.

His cock, engorged with blood and pulsing.

Because of _her_.

The headiness of feeling wanted snaked around her, then, chasing away any thoughts of being nervous or shy. The pressure of his cock against her clit promised something exquisite, lovely, and she found herself rocking against him experimentally.

This earned her another potent groan from him, his hips bucking under hers, and all of the sudden his hands were everywhere—clutching at her thighs, her waist, her breasts, and finally at her shoulders, where he began pushing her cloak back and back.

She shrugged out of it, overheated and impatient to get the garment off. Her shirt came next, and she opened her eyes to find herself naked from the waist up, her breasts bare and bouncing slightly in his face from her movement. She arched into his touch as his hands ghosted over the contours of her breasts, the curve of her sides.

His hands settled on her hips, guiding her, rocking her back and forth against his clothed member, as his lips captured a nipple.

"Ah— _Fuck_ ," she keened as his tongue flicked across the sensitive nub, the sensation sending something hot and tingling skittering down her spine. The fabric of her pajamas was damp, her clit positively on fire, and she was so close—so close—

"Wait!" she cried as he shifted away from her suddenly. "What are you—?"

But he had already rolled her off his lap and stood, leaving her alone on the couch, every nerve protesting the sudden end to sensation. Her fevered mind reeled, wondering if she'd done something wrong, half-expecting him to spit an insult at her and walk away.

But, no, nothing in his expression promised insult or injury. There were high points of color on her cheeks as he stared down at her, his eyes riveted to the curves and angles of her body, as though he couldn't quite believe what he was seeing and had to file away a mental image for later consideration. There was a look of hunger, there, too—like he wanted to take something, _everything_ , away from her.

Then he was kneeling before her, one hand freeing his cock from the confines of his trousers as the other tugged at the waistband of her pajamas.

She lifted her hips and allowed him to slide her remaining clothes off, realizing with a start that she was slumped there on his couch, fully naked, while the only exposed part of his body bobbed, pale, engorged, and…

...and frankly quite large.

Her spine stiffened and locked into a rigid column as she expected to feel his body fall, hot and hard, on top of hers, his member—his frankly rather large member—pressing against her slit. She wanted it. Of course she wanted it. She wasn't sure she'd ever wanted anything more in her life, but…

But that was not what he did.

Snape was talking to her as he knelt there, hooking a hand under her knee and placing it on his shoulder, leaning forward. "I want to taste you," he was remarking silkily. "I want to taste you, I want you to come. Will you let me?"

And the image of him there, between her thighs, his beaked nose just inches from her quim, was so unbelievably erotic that she forgot to be embarrassed, forgot to worry about what it must _smell_ or _taste_ like down there, and she found herself babbling incoherent syllables.

"I—God—Okay— _Yes_."

He smirked and lowered his face to the dark triangle between her thighs. His hair whispered along the inside of her thigh, just grazing a corner of her curse scar, but she didn't care.

His tongue flicked against her center and she found herself sucking in a breath, holding it involuntarily. But soon she was breathing in frenzied pants as the sensations pummeled her. His tongue—so hot and wet—was sliding up and down her slit, plunging shallowly inside her. His lips moved, humming against her flesh, and she cried out as the broad flat of his tongue found her clit and dragged against it.

"Oh, fuck, fuck—"

She found herself chanting it, over and over again. Her thighs were quivering, her slit on fire, every nerve humming, and she was so close again, so _close_.

Her hands flew to his hair, pushing his face to her. Her thighs suddenly clamped, quite outside her control, around either side of his head as he planted his lips firmly on her clit, and _sucked_.

Oh fuck—oh fuck—oh _fuuuuck_!"

Her orgasm came suddenly, like a crashing wave of pleasure, unbelievably wet and all-encompassing. She felt robbed of everything she knew, everything she was, until there was nothing left—no Amy, no Snape, no past or future—just a glittering moment of ecstasy suspended in time, stretching on to infinity, and finally receding into the sound of her breathing and his moan as he, fondling himself with his hand, also came.

For a moment, there was only breathing.

In

Out.

In again.

She felt him slide her leg from his shoulder, then withdraw from her.

Breathe out.

In.

Out again.

Finally, once recovered enough to be cognizant of her surroundings, Amy found that she was stretched out on the battered sofa, one hand over her eyes. She knew there were some... _practicalities_ called for, now, like finding her clothes, and navigating her exit, and doing something about the squelching _wetness_ between her legs. She drew her knees up, together, and started to sit up and collect herself.

She opened her eyes only when something stopped her.

Snape's hand was on her chest, splayed out across her breasts, not precisely holding her down, but gently restricting her ability to get up.

Her eyes snapped to his. Was something... _more_...expected?

The high points of color on his cheeks had faded, and his member was carefully concealed in his trousers again, but his look was the same—that hungry look, like a starving man supping himself by merely memorizing every detail of a great feast. His lips glistened faintly in the pallid green light coming from his lake-window.

She must have made a face in confusion, or maybe even in alarm, because he explained himself quietly as he drew his hand away and straightened.

"I only want to look, Bartleby."

Amy felt herself growing hot, the hairs prickling on her neck. It was one thing to be naked while they were in the act; quite another to just lie there as he, fully-clothed, dragged his eyes across every square inch of her flesh. It was strange, and so…

So _intimate_.

Finally, after what felt like eons, Snape looked away. He plucked her pajama top from the floor and, with an oddly unpracticed air, offered it to her.

She took it from his hand. "Thanks," she breathed.

"This isn't proper, you know," he said.

And she almost laughed, because that must be the understatement of the century. But the look on his face was somber. Serious. So she merely held the top to her chest and dipped her head in acknowledgement.

"I know."

"I don't fuck students." His tone brokered no argument.

This time she _did_ laugh, just a little bit, because it was a line of reasoning quite familiar to her.

Severus Snape did not fuck students.

It simply wasn't done.

 _Ergo_ , in some mystical way, he hadn't fucked her after all, right?

Right?


	9. All The Way

**All The Way**

"Get up, Amy. You've been moping in bed all week. You're starting to stink."

She hasn't been hiding.

Really, she hasn't.

It's just that she knows how this will end. She's not stupid, after all.

She thought about Snape's mouth moving so intimately against her flesh and how desirable he'd made her feel. She thought about his black eyes raking over her skin with that hungry gaze, and the weird flattery that was his 'only wanting to look.' She thought about his cock.

Yeah, she knows how this ends.

This ends in hurt feelings. It ends in a whispered aside, an open secret, a footnote in somebody else's story.

_Whatever happened to that girl, Amy?_

_Amy? Oh, she got all depressed or something. Flunked out of 7th_ _year and fucked a teacher._

_A teacher? Eww._

Her mum had told her it wasn't too late to turn things around. Her father had told her she had "potential." They'd both pulled strings to get her back on the list to take the NEWTs and now expected her to work some last-minute academic miracle because, hey, _she's a smart girl._

At least Snape wasn't angry with her for not living up to her potential. He didn't think she _had_ any potential.

She thought again about what she'd not only _let_ Snape do with her body, but what she'd _begged_ him to do. It's like she'd been a different person, then. And she had a hard time squaring that person with this girl who'd been moping in bed all week, hiding, because she thinks she might just spontaneously combust if he ever touches her or looks at her that way again.

Alex ripped back the hangings of Amy's bed and gave her a dirty look. "I'm serious, Amy. I know you're like, all depressed or whatever, but other people have lives, too. Get up. Take a shower. Then help me with this term paper."

Amy rolled over, away from Alex, and stuffed her face in her pillow. "Get Myron to do it."

"Myron's busy. He's taking all his exams early or something so he can leave for his senior project. _Everybody_ knows that."

Amy groaned into her pillow. "Fiona, then. Get Fiona to help."

"Fiona's busy with _her_ senior project. She's supposed to take the candidates for that empty Governor's seat on a tour of the school today, remember?"

As if anyone could forget about the stupid election. Fiona had spent the last week announcing loudly that the advisory board had nominated candidates, then shoving flyers about it in everyone's faces. These were usually followed by chirpy sentences intended to impress on everyone how very _important_ and _relevant_ the politics were.

" _The Board of Governors decides on the appointment or suspension of the Headmaster!"_

" _The Board of Governors approves the hire and retention of new teachers!"_

" _The Board of Governors sets curriculum standards for each upcoming school year! So, if you're tired of abstinence-only education, tell your parents to vote!"_

Blah, blah, blah.

Amy had even agreed to wear a " _Malfoy for Governor!"_ pin just to make her shut up.

"Whatever," Amy said, and pulled her covers over her head.

Alex ripped them off of her. "Oh, no you don't. Get up, Amy."

The cold air hit her legs and all of the sudden Amy could _smell_ herself. Alex was right; she was starting to stink, and she reeked of cowardice. It turned her stomach.

"Why do you even care?" she snapped at Alex. "What does it matter to Theodore Knott if his trophy wife passes Transfiguration?"

Alex recoiled, obviously hurt, and Amy almost felt bad. Almost.

Then Alex stood up straighter and fortified herself with a huff. "You know what, Amy? Fuck you. Fuck _you_. Just because you've decided to quit on life or whatever doesn't mean everyone else has. Fucking bitch."

And then she stormed out, slamming the door behind her.

Amy stewed in her own stink and shame for about twenty more minutes, then got up and took a shower so scalding and harsh that her skin was still lobster-red when she pulled on her stupid uniform with its stupid skirt and tie and " _Malfoy for Governor!"_ pin.

She found Alex in the Common Room with her Transfiguration work spread over two tables, apparently stressed to the point of tears.

Amy shoved her hands in her pockets. "I'm going to the kitchens," she declared, her voice stiff and petulant even to her own ears.

Alex wiped angry tears from her cheek. "Well, bully for you, Amy."

"Do you want me to bring you back anything? Then we can look at your paper."

The silence between them stretched on so long that Amy nearly turn back to her dormitory, to her bed. Then Alex cleared her throat. "See if they have any of those marshmallow things left, yeah?"

"Yeah," Amy repeated in what she hoped was a diplomatic tone, and left.

She got distracted before she'd even made it to Hufflepuff territory, much less anywhere near the kitchens. Because _of course_ she did.

Before she knew it, she stood in front of the open door to one of the Potions' classrooms, watching as Snape delivered a vicious tongue-lashing to some first or second-year Gryffindor boy.

He levelled the boy with a look that would have destroyed what little sense of self-worth Amy still possessed, had it been directed at her.

"Orange, Weasley," he snapped, ladling some potion out of the cauldron and letting it splash back down so that everyone could see. "Orange. Tell me, boy, does anything penetrate that thick skull of yours? Didn't you hear me say, quite clearly, that only _one_ rat spleen was needed? Didn't I state plainly that a _dash_ of leech juice would suffice? What do I have to do to make you understand, Weasley?"*

She wondered if maybe he wouldn't be quite such an asshole, under different circumstances. Perhaps humiliating 11-year-olds was just his way of chafing against a life two sizes too small.

A few Slytherins in the back giggled. The boy looked close to tears. Then the bell rang.

Snape Vanished the contents of the boy's cauldron and called out homework over the end-of-class din of scraping chairs and cleaning-up. The students seemed impossibly young as they passed her, featherless little fledglings incapable of flight, and she wondered whose brilliant idea it had been to give them wands and make them orphans.

When the last one had left, Snape caught sight of her loitering pointlessly by the doorway and issued one of his _hmph_ noises. "I ought to make you wear a bell."

He wasn't so scary, really, in the light of day.

Snape leaned against his desk and raised an eyebrow at her. "Well? What are you doing here?"

She opened her mouth to make up some transparent excuse about whether he needed any more grading done, then closed it again. "I…I don't really know," she confessed.

He sighed. "Well of course not, Bartleby."

It occurred to her suddenly that perhaps not all…romantic entanglements (is that what they had?) were as awkward as this one, or as constrained. It wasn't as though he could ask her for a drink at the Hog's Head. There wasn't any shared interest or work gossip to discuss over the tops of their butterbeers. She didn't have some cute little rented flat she could invite him up to, afterwards.

They weren't _equals_.

Of course, if they were, there wouldn't be any of this furtive, forbidden thrill, either.

"You got the time wrong," she found herself blurting out.

 _Brilliant_ , Scrivener. Well done.

"Excuse me?" His tone was glacial; low and dangerous.

"In Diagon Alley. The time. We were there at twelve, bur your owl actually said two. That's why my parents were late. Or _seemed_ late. They weren't, actually."

He tipped his chin up slightly and gave her a long, hard look. It was the kind of look that made her sure they were playing some game without a name or rulebook.

"My mistake," he finally said.

He was lying, but how she knew or what she was supposed to do with that information, she had no idea. So she closed the door behind her, locked it with a flick of her wand, and took three steps toward him.

He'll respond to that with something witty and disparaging and rude, because, _God_ , he could be so bristly, so touch-me-not. But it won't stop her from taking a fourth step toward him, and then they'll be clutching at each other again, right there in the Potions' classroom

He'll find her wet and ready for him when his hand sneaks under her knickers like a thief in the night.

 _"Fuck"_ he'll pant against her ear, his voice hot and ragged. _"You feel – "_

And whatever he was going to say will melt into a snarl as _her_ hand does some sneaking of its own.

She'll be fascinated by the smooth, silk-over-steel feel of his cock in her hand.

Then they'll jump guiltily away from one another as some moron knocks on the door to whine about his grade, or ask about the twelve uses of moonstone, or whatever reason students have for seeing their professors beyond conducting illicit affairs.

Snape will allow his fingers to trail surreptitiously over the back of Amy's hand even as he's opening the door to admit the unwanted visitor.

She will gasp audibly at that, because there's no reason such a simple touch should make her knees melt like that, and there's no reason she should be so...so _stricken_ with him. But it does, and she is.

* * *

On a sunny Friday in June, just before final exams, Professor Kettleburn took them to a seasonal pond at the edge of the forbidden forest and told them to think about it for a while.

"Think about what?" said a prissy Ravenclaw, wrinkling her nose.

" _Life_ ," was what he said.

So Amy stood around the pond and thought about life for a while, but nothing particularly profound came to mind. In just over a week, she'd be free of Hogwarts forever.

Fiona sidled up to her, a stack of hand-outs clutched to her chest. "MALFOY, BONES, OR PREWETT – WHO WANTS THE BEST FOR YOUR SCHOOL?" screamed the hand-outs in all-capitals.

Fiona shoved one in her hand. "You know Snape's been asking after you for like, a week, right?"

Amy knew.

And, _God_ , if it wasn't flattering to make him wait.

"So what's he want?" Fiona pressed, the nosy bitch.

Amy shushed her as Kettleburn started lecturing.

He told them about all sorts of critters that lived in the pond, even the boring ones. He talked about microorganisms and algae, insects and invertebrates. He talked about snails and tadpole shrimp and all the other little creatures who'd stopped evolving somewhere around the Mesozoic era because they figured, hey, swimming around in a muddy pond without a brain was as good a way as any to live.

He talked about the interconnectedness of all life — the _beauty_ of it — and how every living thing, from the greatest Wizard to the lowliest bit of pond scum, was part of a whole. Life began in a puddle like the one at their feet, he told them. Life, with all its complications and swollen nodes of pain and shimmering, ephemeral joy, had begun so simply.

Amy could sense her classmates shooting looks at one another, wondering why Kettleburn was talking about bugs and philosophy instead of drilling them on unicorns and acromantula and whatever else they'd be likely to need for their exams.

"Um, Professor?" began one of the Ravenclaws tentatively.

"Yes, Mr. Fawcett?"

"Will this be on the test?"

Kettleburn gave a long-suffering sigh and closed his eyes with a pained expression.

But Amy, for whatever reason, found herself interested. In fact, this was the first time in over a year she'd been interested in any schoolwork at all.

"What's this one?" she asked, pointing down into the shallow edges of the pond. A four-inch creature, something like a crab or a lobster, sat passively in the water, waiting for something interesting to happen. It looked like a rejected Slytherin mascot, all pewter grey with muddy green spots. It was beautiful.

"Well spotted, Miss Scrivener," said Kettleburn, peering into the water. "That may be the only Magical creature in here: The Mackled Malaclaw. Go ahead and pick him up. He's quite harmless. Just grab him by the carapace—no, Miss Scrivener, that is _not_ the carapace — yes, there — good. Hold him up for everyone to see."

Although she wasn't at all sure the Malaclaw wanted to be looked at, she did as Kettleburn asked and held him up.

She promptly dropped him back into the pond with an "Ouch!"

"You've been bitten!" Kettleburn boomed, snatching up her hand to examine the wound. He couldn't have sounded more delighted. "Gather around, class! The bite of the Mack — Stop taking notes and pay attention, Shepard—the bite of the Mackled Malaclaw is a singular one in that it has the unlikely side-effect of burdening the victim with bad luck for up to, but not exceeding, an entire week!" he lectured happily.

Lovely. Brilliant. Just bloody _dandy_.

"I thought you said he was 'quite harmless,'" groused Amy.

"Ah! Ten points to Slytherin! I think you've spotted the great irony of the thing. Yes, normally they _are_ quite harmless. One needs to have exceedingly bad luck to get bitten in the first place!" said Kettleburn. "Miss Scrivener, do be advised that the bad luck generally begins mild and escalates after a few days."

There was probably some kind of idiom for this. Bad luck begets bad luck, maybe?

Kettleburn kept her after class and gave her a note excusing her from every single class, exam, and responsibility for the entire upcoming week with the assurance that she was better off avoiding magic for the time being.

"I know you're back on the list to take the NEWTs," Kettleburn said, handing her the note. "But I'm sure you can take them in the next round, instead. That's, erm, probably for the best, in any case. I'll speak to Sev…" he trailed off, apparently thinking better of that plan. "I'll speak to the _Headmaster_ about it."

This meant there were no more classes left.

None.

No final exams.

No NEWTs.

In one week, her probation would be over and _no more Hogwarts._

Amy positively beamed.

* * *

The next day, Amy discovered a rather interesting book in the library called _Enchantments for Editors_. She had been reading it for nearly an hour, and scratching her Malaclaw bite absently, when she was interrupted by Myron.

He whirled into the library in a dramatic flurry of robes and cleared his throat in a most distressingly Snape-like way. "You are to locate Miss Scrivener," he drawled in his best impression of Snape. "I imagine you'll find her in the library, reading something deeply boring about sentence sprawl."

Amy snapped the book shut, scowling, and tried to hide the title. "And why are you to find Miss Scrivener?"

"She is to be my eyes and ears, Mr. Wagtail, as you embark on this ill-advised publicity stunt."

"She is?"

"She will be escorting you to your meeting to ensure you represent the school well."

"She will?"

"Your actions reflect on this school and this House – _my_ House. You will not say anything critical of the school, the Dumbledore administration, or any staff member, including myself. You are not to appear anything less than deeply fond of the giant squid, for that matter. Rest assured, Miss Scrivener will tell me if you neglect to mind these directions."

Amy, who didn't much like being pimped out as Snape's own person snitch, frowned. "Well, this is all news to me," she said.

Myron shrugged, dropping the impression. "Just Snape being Snape. I've a meeting in the Three Broomsticks with someone from the _Prophet._ She's doing a piece on my senior project. Want to come?'

Yes, Amy did want to come. She hadn't been to Hogsmeade all year, and Myron's pass was just the ticket she needed.

"One final thing," Myron said as they left the library, resuming his impression of Snape, "You are to remain _on topic_ – is that understood?"

The trouble was, the reporter didn't seem to want to stay on topic at all. She was already waiting for them in the pub, a gigglewater at one elbow and an acid-green quill at the other. "Rita Skeeter, Jr. correspondent," she'd said by way of introduction, and shook both their hands aggressively.

"So, how long have the two of you been together?" was her first question.

Myron and Amy exchanged a discomfited look and assured her they were just friends. When Amy said something along the lines of 'I'm not dating anyone,' the acid green quill zoomed illegibly across the parchment with an energy that quite impressed Amy. She'd read a great deal about quill enchantments while copying that MLA handbook for Snape.

"Ignore the quill, dear," was all Ms. Skeeter had to say about it. Then she bought Amy the first of several mulled meads.

In retrospect, Amy really should have known better.

Ms. Skeeter asked them both several leading questions about the school, especially Dumbledore's leadership and the issues of safety and transparency. She spoke very quickly, except for one or two words per sentence whose vowels were drawled out in a fairly obnoxious manner:

"Would you say the school is, at present, a _saaaafe_ place for students?"

"Can the Headmaster be _truuuusted_ to tell parents the truth about what happens behind his walls?"

"Is Dumbledore _faaair_ in his treatment of students from different Houses and backgrounds?"

"What are students _saaaaying_ about the upcoming Board of Governors' _eleeeeeection_?"

She seemed especially interested in Amy's answers, which involved a lot of "Er's" and "Um's" as she watched the quill vomit out unreadable text.

Eventually Myron, apparently desperate to get back on the topic of his senior project, pulled a Memoriball out of his pocket. Skeeter couldn't have been more delighted.

"Ah – I understand there's been q _uiiiiiite_ the trouble with those this year," she said, her quill scratching madly at her elbow. "On a scale of one to ten, how _seeeeerious_ would you consider the Memoriball problem at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and _Wizardryyyyyy_?"

Myron, sensing a path of least resistance, shrugged with false innocence. "How about I show you?" he asked, proffering the Memoriball for all to use.

Miss Skeeter, obviously no stranger to them, placed a finger on the odd little object and closed her eyes. Myron bade Amy to do the same, and, reluctantly, she did. She closed her eyes and experienced a curious sensation of falling and spinning, not unlike Floo travel. When she opened them again, she found herself in a different pub – or, rather, the _memory_ of a different pub – one not at all like the Three Broomsticks.

At the front of the club was a stage, and on the stage was a band. Smack dab in the center was Myron Wagtail, allowing the final chord of a song to reverberate on a curious, cello-like instrument that appeared to be connected via cords to several black boxes of Muggle origin. The club around him exploded in cheers and applause. Myron, sweaty and exhilarated, grabbed an odd-looking device from the stand before him and screamed into it, 'THANK YOU, LONDON!"

More cheers, screaming applause.

"THIS NEXT ONE IS DEDICATED TO A FRIEND I KNEW IN SCHOOL. AND A ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR!"

Music filled the bar. It went something like this:

_Sometimes I feel I've got to  
Run away I've got to  
Get away  
From the pain that you drive into the heart of me  
The love we share  
Seems to go nowhere  
And I've lost my light  
For I toss and turn I can't sleep at night_

_Once I ran to you (I ran)  
Now I'll run from you  
This tainted love you've given  
I give you all a boy could give you  
Take my tears and that's not nearly all  
Oh tainted love  
Tainted love**_

Amy didn't even look at the reporter. She was too busy staring at Myron in pure, unadulterated astonishment. "What the…what the _hell_ is this?" she shouted at him.

Myron looked endearingly boyish as he smiled. "My senior project" he shouted back. "I'm in a Muggle cover band!"

It took Amy so long to adjust to this new information that she didn't even protest when the reporter took a picture of her and Myron, nor did she read the whatever-it-was that Skeeter gave her before signing it. Instead, the entire walk back to the Castle and the dorms, she asked questions.

"What did you say your band's name was?" she asked Myron for the umpteenth time.

"The Wired Sisters – because, you know, we're _wired_."

"They'll probably call you the _Weird_ Sisters," Amy said, shaking her head in disbelief.

He laughed. "That's not bad – kinda catchy."

"So that's what you've been doing for your senior project? Going to London? Playing music? For _Muggles_?" No matter how many times she clarified the basics with him, she found she still couldn't quite believe it.

"That's right," he said.

"For _Muggles_?"

Myron stopped just in front of the entrance to the Slytherin Common Room. "I know what you're thinking, Amy. All that pure-blood stuff. That's why I didn't tell anyone. But these Muggles…they know what they're doing. I mean, Warbeck was the last person in our world to do anything innovative with music since Vivaldi! We're still playing on acoustics, but the Muggles have these _amazing_ instruments. And the _crowds…_ I just…I can't spend the rest of my life playing weddings and funerals, you know?"

She got the sense he'd been waiting to say this to someone for a long time.

"Your dad's going to be pissed," was all she could think to say. "Doesn't he want you to work at Gringotts?"

"My dad wants a lot of things," Myron said. "Maybe seeing my name in the paper will make him think differently. _If_ my name ever gets in the paper. That reporter didn't seem very focused, did she?"

Amy shrugged. "Maybe It'll all come together when it's published."

"Maybe."

"How'd you even get in contact with that woman? Slughorn?" Amy asked.

Myron frowned, looking oddly discomfited. "That's the weird thing – It was Professor Snape's idea."

" _Snape_?" Amy repeated, looking over at him.

"Yeah, he set the whole thing up. Weird, innit?"

"Huh," said Amy.

Like she said, she really should have known better.

"Hey, Myron?" she asked.

"Yeah?"

"You go on without me. I just realized I left my watch at the Three Broomsticks. I'm going to go back and get it." This was a lie, of course.

"Sure," said Myron. "You want me to walk with you?"

"No, I'll be fine. See you later."

"Alright, bye."

As soon as he was safely in the Common Room, Amy turned on her heel and walked the familiar steps to Snape's private quarters.

* * *

Snape stood crucified in the doorway, his arms braced against either side of the threshold, and looked down his great ugly nose at her.

This was the fourth time and final she'd lingered outside his private quarters, and this time he'd opened the door before she even had the chance to knock. He was strangely human in his shirtsleeves and trousers; the most exposed she'd ever seen him.

On his left forearm, his Dark Mark stood out sharply against the whiteness of his skin. It made her think of words like transgression, absolution, fate. It made her want to trace the lines of causality from the immediacy of here and now all the way back to their foggy origins.

It made her want to touch him.

"So. You came." He sounded as though he were internally debating whether he shouldn't just tell her to get the fuck out of his sight. _Now_.

Amy smiled faintly, emboldened by mulled mead still sloshing around in her gut. "I hope to, anyway."

He moved silently aside with an air of surrender, then closed the door behind her once she'd entered.

"Would you like a drink?" His tone was stiffly polite, almost formal, the same way her parents spoke to each other after a fight.

"Sure," she said, setting her schoolbag down on his couch.

Snape must have been doing something fancy with their drinks – adding a twist of lemon, or a dash of contraceptive – because he took so long in making them that she found herself wandering in his rooms, restless. Everything seemed new somehow, imbued with meaning and history. Perhaps that red book in Latin was bought with Abraxas Malfoy's gold. Maybe Snape's lover – the one she, Amy, is _nothing_ like – bought him the pocket-watch sitting neatly on the coffee table.

Before she knew it, she'd opened the door to his bedroom and was peering in.

Well.

She could almost believe Slytherin himself once slept here.

Almost.

A massive lake-window dominated one wall, its murky green light casting shadows on Snape's side-table, his trunk, his bed. This latter was huge, the sheets black, and the four posters adorned with serpentine woodwork. Tiny emerald chips glinted in her direction – the snakes' eyes.

It was an intimidating bed.

More inviting was a plush carpet cushioning the stone floor. She kicked off her shoes and socks, then stepped to the center of the room and curled her toes into the fibers. As she looked down at her own feet where they nestled into the rug, two boots appeared in her line of sight.

She looked up to find Snape offering her a glass, his expression queer, as if slightly puzzled by the sight of this teenaged girl standing in his bedroom. His fingers brushed hers as she took the whiskey from his hand.

Amy almost expected him to raise his glass – to clink it against hers – and then wanted to laugh at herself. Because what in Merlin's name would they even be toasting?

 _Choice_ , she thought.

Snape downed his drink expertly, no stranger either to hard alcohol or potions, and she watched the complicated architecture of muscles move as he swallowed, his Adam's apple falling down, then rising back up. He set his glass on the bedside table with a muted _clink_.

He stood very close to her, and didn't have to reach far to finger the _"Malfoy for Governor!"_ pin attached to her lapel.

"Were you wearing this during the interview?" he asked.

She blinked. What an odd question. "Oh, yeah. I must have. I'd forgotten it was even on."

His hand slid off the pin and down over the fabric of her shirt, just barely ghosting over the contour of a breast.

"It was…nice of you," she said. "Having me go with Myron to Hogsmeade. I'd really missed it."

The corner of his mouth twitched at that, threatening either a smile or a sneer, and if there was something like regret in his look, she chaulked it up to the fact that they shouldn't have been doing this.

He nodded to the tumbler in her hand. "I haven't poisoned the drink, you know," he told her.

Amy felt herself smile again. "I know," she said, and raised the glass to her lips. It burned her sinuses going down and, while her eyes were still pinched together against the sensation, she felt Snape take the empty glass from her hand and heard him set it down by its twin on the side table.

She became aware of her heart beating, whooshing too loudly in her ears.

_Lub-dub._

_Lub-dub._

Snape was giving her a strange look again.

_Lub-dub._

_lub-dub._

Every beat that passed increased the probability that she would lose her nerve or that he would do something _weird_. She hurried to kiss him before either had a chance to happen, all her inexperience evident in the way her teeth clacked against his. He didn't seem to mind.

His chest felt different without the many-layered teaching robe covering it. Harder, and more tense. She plucked at the buttons of his shirt, undressing him with fumbling hands.

He was thin and hard, all lean muscle and bone, with a slight dusting of black hair over his chest. A knotted scar stretched across his ribs on his left side, the relic of some long-ago duel. His was a body made for spying and for war, and she knew, when he pulled away from the kiss and looked at her, that she must look silly and enraptured by the sight of him, with all his history written there on his flesh. He didn't seem to mind that, either.

And it's funny, because for all her near-virginal disbelief that they were really doing this, they _were_. And it was so very easy. It was easy to shed their clothes, and it was easy to surrender to him as he walked her backwards until the backs of her knees hit the edge of the bed. Then she was sitting, lying down, and he was crawling on top of her, and none of it was very difficult, after all.

His skin touched hers in all sorts of unseen places, but she found herself distracted by his gaze where he stared at her again, searching her face for the slightest indication of pleasure or pain as he squeezed her breasts, toyed with her nipples, rubbed her cunt against the bony fulcrum of his thigh. The intensity of it made her breath catch in her chest, and for a moment she wanted to crawl out of her own skin, because she's never been looked at so intimately before in her life.

"Does…" she began tentatively.

"Yes?" He quirked his head minutely, his voice strangely labored.

"Does it have to be…does it have to be quite so bright in here?"

He plunged them into near darkness with a whispered " _Nox_."

In the gloomy half-light of the window, she became aware of all sorts of novel sensations.

Not just of the aching in her quim, but of the thousand other gentle, lovely feelings in parts of her body she'd never thought of as sexual. The small hairs on the back of her neck, sliding against the soft fabric of Snape's pillow. The feel of his sheets under the soles of her feet, where they were anchored flat on the mattress. Snape's hand, just ghosting over the curve of her side. His breath feathering over the whorls of her ear.

"Say my name," he purred into her ear. "Say it."

Her tongue had already pressed to the roof of her mouth, seamlessly blending the _S_ into the _N_ , when she realized that wasn't what he'd meant at all. She abandoned the word and tried another:

"Sn…Severus."

"Yess…" he hissed. "Again."

She said it again, lingering on the sibilant _S_. " _Severus_."

He made her come with his mouth again, as he had the night after they'd seen the dragon.

Still buzzing and drunk from her orgasm, she barely registered what he was doing as he wiped his face discreetly on the corner of a sheet and crawled back up her body. Then his weight was settling over her, and one of his hands disappeared, snaking into the scant space between their bodies, and she snapped back to reality as she felt his cock at her slick folds, probing, sliding up and down.

"I – "

"Relax," he said, and eased forward.

Her lungs stuttered, and her body quivered under his. Then his mouth found hers, and he tasted of her – musky, and forbidden.

" _Fuck_ ," he moaned into her skin, then sank his teeth deliciously into the flesh of her shoulder.

She whimpered against the pressure, the fullness, the _strangeness_ , as he pressed into her, filling her to the hilt.

Just as she was getting used to the sensation, he began to pull out of her, and the slow drag of flesh against flesh ravaged what little was left of coherent thought. His hips snapped forward again, and his public bone ground against her clit, and she found herself crying his name again.

" _Severus!"_

He began to rock in and out of her in earnest, with her cries punctuated here and there by the moist, carnal slap of those particularly hard thrusts that sent shockwaves pulsating across her clit. She was practically weeping now, her nerves overtaxed from the last orgasm even as a new one built. It's not painful, but it made her think of pain, and of a loss of control, and of the sound glass makes when it breaks.

And just when she's sure she _will_ lose control and fall to pieces, Snape gathered her in his arms, pulling her tightly to him, the movement of his hips becoming hard and erratic.

"Fuck – _God_ – you feel –" he hissed raggedly between breaths, and she was surprised to actually _feel_ his orgasm flare inside her, and fill her, because –

His thumb found her clit, and made these circling motions, and –

"Ah!" Her hips bucked wildly, and a dull red filmed over her vision, and she had to screw her eyes shut and dig her nails into his back to anchor herself against the surge of sensation. It _was_ like breaking glass, like losing herself in hairline fissures, and shattering along the sharpest edges of pleasure.

His body collapsed on top of hers, heavy and slick with sweat, at once protective and confining. They lay joined like that for what felt like a long time, only breathing, waiting for the surge to recede. Then he rolled off of her, out of her, and she winced at the sudden slickness between her legs.

Amy's first coherent thought – when she could have a coherent thought, again, and was cognizant of the fact that Snape had already gotten up and began to dress – was that she should leave.

She didn't know much about relationships, but she doubted theirs was the kind that involved spending the night and having tea and toast together in the morning.

Still, the idea of going back to her dorm – to the same bed she'd slept in since she was eleven – made her stomach twist unpleasantly. So instead, after composing herself and dressing in his lavatory, she sat on the sill of Snape's lake-window and smoked one of his cigarettes.

That was usual policy, right? That one could stay for at least as long as it took to have a post-coital smoke?

Based on the muted gold filtering through the lake water, she suspected that the sun was just beginning to rise.

"What was your paper about?" she asked suddenly.

"My _what_?"

She could see through the window's reflection that he was standing, wearing nothing but his trousers as he leaned against the bedpost, but she couldn't make out his expression. She imagined, though, that it was sated. Like a wolf after the kill.

"Your paper," she repeated. "The one you submitted in Diagon Alley, around Easter."

He took a long time in answering, as if weighing how much to say. Then, tersely, "The properties of pomegranate seeds."

"Huh. I've never seen a recipe that called for the fruit. Leaves and flowers, yes, but never the actual fruit." She knew she was talking too much, but she couldn't help it.

"Well of course not, Bartleby. You failed Potions."

She gave him a look through the window and only continued when she figured she'd properly expressed her indignation. "So what are they used for? Pomegranates?"

He lit up his own cigarette before speaking. "Love Potions, Veritaserum, Binding Elixirs – anything involving compulsion."

"Like Persephone," she said suddenly.

" _Whom_?"

"Persephone – from the Greek myth. I don't remember it very well...I think Hades kidnaps her and takes her to the underworld. Her mum intercedes on her behalf, asking...Zeus? I think? to make Hades release her. But just before she gets the news that she's to be freed, she eats three pomegranate seeds. And...And she _knows_ better. She does. But she's so frightened and starving, she can't resist. She eats three pomegranate seeds, so she has to stay in the underworld three months out of the year. She's goddess of the harvest or something, so, for those three months, nothing grows. It's winter..."

Amy realized she'd been talking to the window for a long time, uninterrupted.

She licked her lips and looked down at her cigarette. It was only half gone; she still had time. "Anyway, that's just what pomegranates reminded me of. It's not important. Just kind of a sad story."

"I haven't forced you to be here." There's just the slightest hint of defensiveness tinging his words.

She actually turned to face him, then, and found his eyes narrowed against the smoke coiling in the room. He took an aggressive drag of his cigarette, then let the smoke pour out his nostrils. His cigarette was about half-gone, too.

"I know," Amy said. "It wasn't supposed to be, like, a metaphor or anything. It's just what I thought of."

And the way he looked away from her and shook his head minutely, as if clearing away the cobwebs of some private musing, or answering his own question with a "no" or, just, well... _something_. It was so _strange_. And she wanted more than anything to ask what he was thinking.

But then the cigarette burned past the filter, nearly searing her fingers, and she dropped it in one of the empty glass tumblers on the bedside table.

"I should go," she said.

"You should," he agreed absently.

But Snape caught her lightly by the elbow as she passed. "Wait. Come here."

He pulled her to him and, in an odd gesture that spoke more of paternal than erotic affection, pressed his thin lips to her forehead.

Years later, she'll still be unnerved by the uncharacteristic tenderness of that action, and by the way it had seemed like the kind of apology you offer to someone you never expect to see again.

Years later, she'll still be struck that such tenderness can precede such betrayal.

* * *

* Taken from Canon - Snape says this to Neville in Prisoner of Azkaban.

** Tainted Love, a song originally composed by Ed Cobb, although I imagine Myron singing the Soft Cell version.


	10. My Last Ghost - Part 1

**Author's Notes:** This is a fanfic - Standard disclaimers apply. I own nothing.

Thank you again to those who favorited/followed. Please do review; any feedback is appreciated. 

**A/N: 12.19.20 -**

**Thank you so, so, so much to those who left reviews. My apologies for the delay in updating. I've decided to split the final chapter into two - here is the first part.**

* * *

**Part 1**

Amy crept into bed in the wee hours of Sunday morning and slept soundly until noon. When she woke, she discovered two things. First, her Malaclaw bite had turned a nasty green overnight, and, second, that she'd missed Myron. He'd finished up his last early exam and left the Castle for a week to go on a tour with his band. This was the culmination of his senior project – he'd be back just in time to attend graduation.

Amy wondered if it wasn't too early to start packing.

On Monday, the Malaclaw struck again: Fiona and Alex had an accident during their Charms NEWT and had to be shipped off to St. Mungo's for a few days. This meant that Amy had no friends left at Hogwarts to keep her apprised of current events.

Amy spent most of the day making friends with Fiona's cat.

On Tuesday, the cat – Whose name, by the way, was Mr. Cuddle-Whiskers – ate Amy's parents' owl _en route_ to the Great Hall to deliver the post. This meant that Amy never got the news about what was going to be in the news.

Wednesday began an almost comical desynchronization with the rest of the world. Amy slept through the Alarm Spell on her watch, so she missed the _Daily Prophet_ delivery on which this headline was front-page news:

**RAPE AT HOGWARTS SCHOOL OF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRY**

Each time the paper might have entered her view, she was remarkably (one might say, _magically_ ) distracted. Her shoes would come untied and need tending, or a seam on her bag would fail and need mending, or else she had the sudden urge to sneeze.

On Thursday, the last day of exams and the same day that every Tom, Dick, and Harry at Hogwarts somehow managed to get a copy of the Memoriball containing the worst day of Amy's life, she came down with a head cold. She spent the entire day in bed and didn't even feel like reading, or else she might have appreciated the masterful way Lucius Malfoy dog-whistled his way through an impassioned open letter to the Headmaster.

The letter railed against "The unacceptable lack of transparency at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry." It exposed "The Dumbledore Administration's incestuous relationship with the Bones Court." It bemoaned the lack of deference given to "The most established members of the Wizarding Community."

"I have always wanted a daughter," the letter concluded, "But I now find myself in the curious position of being relieved not to have one. After all, how could I send her to a school where her safety is far from guaranteed?"

The voters – these same people who had lived through a war predicated on the unacceptability of miscegenation – asked themselves the very same question.

Somebody at the _Prophet_ had been paid handsomely to make sure the open letter appeared next to yet another article about the rape, and yet another picture of the victim. Myron had been cropped out of the photo, but the _"Malfoy for Governor!"_ pin on the girl's lapel was still very much in frame.

On Friday, Lucius Malfoy won his campaign for the vacant Governor's seat by a comfortable margin.

Amy, meanwhile, found an abandoned romance novel in the Common Room about a sensitive, tortured-soul American vampire who falls in love with a teenaged pop star. She thought it was hilarious, and was so busy reading that she missed the furtive, horrified looks coming from every corner.

She even had a coughing fit while walking past the teacher's lounge, which meant that she didn't hear this exchange:

"This was you!" accused Minerva McGonagall, her lips white with rage as she shoved a copy of the _Prophet_ under Severus Snape's nose. "This _entire week_ was you! You have damaged the reputation of this school – and for what? To satisfy some petty personal vendetta?!"

"I haven't the slightest idea what you're referring to, Professor McGonagall," Snape replied smootly, and turned back to his copy of _The Practical Potioneer_ with a self-satisfied smirk.

Dumbledore would later fix him with a look of fatherly disappointment and say, "It's nice to see you finally taking an interest in your students, Severus."

* * *

By Saturday the effects of the Malaclaw had nearly worn off. The bad luck lingered just a little in the morning, when Amy got roped into spending time with the only person at Hogwarts more oblivious than herself – Professor Noun.

The older witch was determined that none of her 6th or 7th year students should leave without having cast a fully-formed Patronus charm at least once.

"Wonderful!" cried Professor Noun from the top of the D.A.D.A. classroom. "Really great job, Charlie! I knew you could do it!"

Amy looked up from her vampire book and saw Charlie—some round-faced Hufflepuff—grinning from ear to ear as he and his D.A.D.A. professor admired his Patronus.

It was a very bright, very white, and very friendly-looking bunny-rabbit.

All the Patronuses – pardon her, _spirit animals_ – were like that, rodent-y little woodland creatures of the sort you'd see anthropomorphized in a children's novel. In fact, Charlie's must have been the third bunny-rabbit Amy's seen in the hour she'd been sitting at the back of the classroom, waiting for her turn to benefit from a last-ditch remedial D.A.D.A. lesson.

Pardon her, a 'special skills session.'

"Now, go show all your friends, Charlie! We'll see you next year!" said Professor Noun, looking exhilarated and very much like a woman on a roll.

Charlie and his bunny-rabbit left.

Professor Noun turned to Amy with a winning smile. "Well, dear, let's try again! I've got a good feeling about this time!"

Amy didn't know why. It's not as though she'd shown any aptitude for this spell all year, and, anyway, it wasn't like a dementor was just going to pop out at her one day while she's out buying lemons. There was probably a reason you couldn't just _Avada_ the bastards, but she had no idea what it was. Maybe she'd ask Sna—

Snape.

Amy set down her book and slouched to the front of the classroom to join Professor Noun. She was just raising her wand to attempt, one more time, to cast the charm, when a silver-green blur burst through the classroom door and skidded to a halt next to her. It had the acrid, manly smell like a sweaty goat that always seemed to hang around Quidditch robes, regardless of how many times they were washed.

It was Myron.

"There you are," he said to Amy.

Professor Noun positively beamed. "How nice, Amy! One of your friends has come to watch!"

Amy lowered her wand and scowled at Myron. The last thing she needed was an audience.

But Myron barely spared Professor Noun a glance before babbling something about needing to "borrow" his friend. He steered Amy away, to the back of the classroom, speaking in low tones. "Amy, I this is important. I need to talk to you."

"Myron, why are you wearing Quidditch robes?"

"What?" he said distractedly. "Oh, they were the only school clothes that were clean. I just got back."

Amy puzzled over the surprising fact that Myron considered these "clean" as she watched him open and close his mouth several times, apparently at a loss for where to begin.

"Well?" she prompted. "What is it?"

"I…I need to talk to you," he said, after several false starts.

She was beginning to get irritated now. "Yes, you said that. About _what_?"

He made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a groan. " _Jesus_ , Amy, do you really not know? How can you not know?"

"Know _what_ , Myron?"

He had a great deal of trouble getting to the point and seemed unable to meet her eye. "Do you remember when Tremlett and I got into a fight in the Common Room?" he finally asked.

"Um…sure?"

"Tremlett had this Memoriball. It was… _God_ , it was _disgusting_ , Amy. Horrible. There's this girl in it, and she's…she's being…but I didn't stick around long enough to see her face."

A curiously cold sensation came over her, like a cube of ice slipping down her spine.

"It was – it was _you_ , Amy. The girl was _you_. It's all over the school – all over everywhere. That fucking reporter wrote an article about it. I mean, she doesn't really name you – your face is sort of blurry in the picture – but everybody knows it's you, Amy. _Everybody knows_."

Professor Noun chose just this moment to bustle to the back of the classroom and join them.

"Well, Amy dear, time to give it a go! You know the incantation," she bade warmly and cluelessly as Myron looked anywhere but at Amy.

Amy stood there in stunned, speechless horror. Everything faded except for the distant mental _click_ as one piece of information fitted to the next.

Snape's joke, from the beginning of the year, about the flourishing black market in illicit memories.

_Click._

Snape's being on a rampage about Tremlett's Memoriball, having the boys' dorms searched for more.

_Click._

His contriving to spend two hours with her in Diagon Alley, where she had a dream about a crow giving a Memoriball to a ferret.

 _Click_.

Just days ago, when he'd let her go to Myron's _Prophet_ interview in Hogsmeade.

_Click. Click. Click._

"Go on, dear! Give it a shot!" cheered Professor Noun, cutting though the _clicking_.

Mechanically, Amy raised her wand and said, " _expecto patronum_." Something that looked like a wisp of cloud came out of her wand for exactly a twelfth of a second before dissipating and disappearing entirely.

Professor Noun shook her head. "Amy, dear! You're not even trying!" She smiled warmly and placed her chubby hand—quite without permission—on Amy's shoulder. Amy stared at it.

"I want you to look deep inside yourself," the older witch said, suddenly thrusting her free hand out to some Mystical Beyond that definitely was not inside Amy's self. Having gestured to that place, she looked back at Amy and continued, "And ask yourself, what animal says 'Amy'?"

No animal says 'Amy.' Animals don't talk.

She removed her hand, leaving Amy's skin crawling, and bade her try again. Amy did. Nothing happened.

the older woman again placed her hand—and again without permission—on Amy's shoulder. Then she placed her other hand on Amy's other shoulder. Then she leaned in far, far too close. It was an obvious attempt to _reach_ her student, to change her life, to win a teaching award. She smelled like pumpkin juice and some eucalyptus throat lozenge that a koala probably would have enjoyed. It mingled, nauseatingly, with the masculine stench still issuing from Myron's Quidditch robes.

That's exactly what _he'd_ smelled like, her rapist. Like sweat and mint.

"Come, now, Amy, dear. What's your happiest memory?" the professor asked, her sick-room sweet breath sliding over Amy's cheeks like a lecher's touch. "Think about something that really _matters_."

Something that _matters_. Was what this woman wanted, a fact that _mattered_?

The fact of the matter is this: the very idea of _mattering_ is a delusion of such magnitude it's practically a joke.

It's a practical _fucking_ joke.

Just like Melville said.

Think the Dark Lord will come save you? Just kidding! He was killed by a baby. The most powerful wizard ever to walk the face of the earth fell at the feet of a nappy-wearing, long "ee" ending _baby_. Woo! Isn't that a whopper?

Think your blood is pure? Yeah, sure it is. Until one day you're coming back from a Quidditch match, drunk, and some idiot makes sure you'll never feel pure or clean ever again. Some fool does that to you right outside your professor's empty office, and somebody makes a fortune selling the memory, and nobody has anything to say. What a doozy that one is. A real bloody laugh, isn't it?

Want to know something even funnier? It's a secret, so don't tell, but the funniest thing is that the only person who makes her feel anything but completely fucking numb is an angry, sarcastic drunk who fluffed her with his lies and fucked her on his bed and he _knew._ He _knew_ and he lied to her and he set her up. He's a liar and a cheat and a monster and she is so damaged, so ruined, that she fucked him anyway.

How's that for looking _inside_ herself?

So you want to know about something that matters? You want to know the truth of the universe? You want to know what animal embodies—not _says_ , but _embodies_ —Amy?

Okay. Fine. She can do that.

The truth is that there is no truth, and the fact of the matter is that she's a cockroach, okay?

She's a scurrying bit of self-deluded human waste. The star of her very own rape fantasy. A prop in a porno for perverts to beat off too before they kiss their wives good night. She's a freak; a roadside attraction.

Come one!—Come all!—Come see AMY THE AMAZING HUMAN COCKROACH!

For a knut she'll give you one of her cadaver kisses, and if you want to know what it's like to fuck a corpse, you don't even have to get consent!

That's the state of things, and there isn't a God-damned thing anybody can do about it, so maybe it's time to just grow the fuck up and accept that already. Just accept that not everybody's soul looks like Peter Cottontail and only Hufflepuffs get their happily ever afters.

That's the truth of the matter.

So unless you, Professor Stupid Fucking Name, can be the first person to actually explain _why_ absolutely everything in my life has gone to shit, you can take your positive thinking and your story-book spirit animals and your delusions of _mattering_ and just shove them up your—

"Amy!"

Oh.

Oh, Shit.

Had she said that aloud?

* * *

The door to Snape's office—once overwhelming in its weight and scale—flew open under the force of Amy's magic like a leaf blowing in the wind. As she stormed inside, her rage storming with her, several specimen jars broke, showering the room with broken glass and bits of frog guts. Snape rose from his desk, looking angry but not particularly surprised to see her there.

"You!" she said, an accusing finger thrust in his face. She was too angry to speak coherently, too rageful to keep her finger from trembling. "You did this!"

His black eyes glittered malevolently. "I did _what_ , Bartleby?"

But the scale of what he did to her was too large for words to contain. It was beyond articulation, and, struggling to find a starting point, she began at the beginning. "If Slughorn were here—"

"Slughorn _isn't_ here," Snape interrupted tersely. "Slughorn could no longer stomach the task of civilizing you arrogant, self-absorbed little pissants. Slughorn cannot help you."

"And you can?!" she burst out suddenly. "Brilliant job you've done of it so far, just _brilliant_. You know what? I think the big secret about you is that there is no secret. I don't think you're a noble or tortured soul underneath a bristly exterior. I think you're exactly as mean and resentful and petty as you seem, and what you did for me you did out of spite. Just a great big 'fuck-you' to the Headmaster and McGonogall and the Ministry. Because you really _are_ their hostage, and you wanted to prove to them all that you still have a todger. So don't give me this bullshit about you 'helping' me! Were you 'helping' me when you had your tongue halfway up my—"

"Keep your voice down!" he hissed.

"Do you think I'm stupid?!" she shouted. "I fucking must be, thinking that I could trust you! All this time you knew! I fucking trusted you—I let you do those things to me—and you knew!"

"I knew _what_ , girl?"

"About the memory! You knew, God damn it, you've known since the beginning of the year, when you made that stupid joke – 'you might have made a fortune for your trouble' – You knew!"

"No, I _suspected_. I suspected it would find its way here and I waited for it."

"And when it came? What did you do, then? You made sure it got to the right people, that ferret fuck Malfoy, and then you made sure I was in the same room with that fucking reporter! That's _me_ in that memory, God damn it, _me_! I had a right to know!"

"And what would you have done with that information?" he asked, looking down at her with utmost contempt. "Tell me, how would your life have been so vastly improved by that knowledge? Forgive me if I thought to spare you some humiliation."

"Spare me…?!" she repeated in disbelief. "Spare me…?! You have ruined my life! And why? To embarrass the Headmaster? To get your friend elected in some stupid election?"

"You have no idea the weight of the things you're discussing."

"The weight!" she practically screeched.

"Yes, the _weight_!" he repeated, spittle flying from his mouth. He looked quite deranged suddenly—rageful and self-righteous, his eyes bulging, hair falling all around his face. "Look past that medieval sense of shame or whatever it is addling your brain and _think_ a minute. Did you truly imagine you and that idiot boy were the first vicious children to act out your parents' war? Do you think you'll be the _last_? You weren't. You won't. But by Merlin, you _will_ be the last one to haunt me! You will be my last ghost!"

These last words, shouted, echoed around the chamber.

_My last ghost._

Amy stared at him in disbelief as he paused and took a deep breath to compose himself. When he spoke again, his tone was calmer.

"I cannot change what happened to you," he said. "But I _will_ make the Headmaster understand that the authority I hold over my own House is total. That there are consequences to his favoritism. And the next time this happens, I will have a powerful ally on the Board and the Headmaster will think twice before overruling me. This was a worthwhile attainment requiring no small effort on my part. And if your wretched little feelings were hurt in the process, that is a decision I can live with."

"But it wasn't your decision. You don't get to make decisions like that for me!"

"And who else would? _You_? The idea of you making intelligent decisions for yourself is so laughable—"

"But it was _mine_!" she cried, her face wet. She was crying; she was weeping through eyes swollen and screwed up with frustration; bordering on incoherence and enraged by her inability to innumerate all the ways he had wronged her. "It was _my_ memory, _my_ decision; this is my _life!_ And after everything that's been taken away from me, you would take this too? What more do you want?! I am empty, Snape, I have nothing left to give you!"

"We both know that you didn't come to me for my compassion, Bartleby. So what is it? What is it that you think I am?!"

"I thought you were a hero, God damn it!"

And, just like that, his anger seemed to vanish with the echo of this awful, embarrassing last confession that she just wanted to shove back in her mouth. He pinched the bridge of his nose as though a gale-forced migraine were bashing at the jagged edges of his skull and said, "Oh, stop. Just stop, before you fall into that navel you're constantly gazing at."

"So now I navel-gaze?!" she demanded, trying desperately to hold on to her self-righteous indignation.

"Yes, you navel-gaze," he confirmed, looking up. "It is the reason you are failing, it is the reason you are unhappy, and it is the reason you are standing there dreaming up new neuroses and calling me the cause. Yes, I lied to you. Yes, I took action – because somebody had to and I think it's painfully obvious that that person was never going to be you. I gave you plenty of opportunities to see what I was doing, but you weren't _paying attention._

Where you might have noticed something of concern to yourself —where you might have _applied_ yourself, you wandered about morosely, waiting for the world to grace you with reasons and reassurances. They are not coming." He raised his hand as if to highlight the futility of it all. "You may as well wait for Godot!"

His words shouldn't have even meant anything. It was merely a string of insults and an allusion to an absurdist play about two fools who wait for a god that never comes, but he'd pegged her to a tee with those words, and they both knew it.

"It has been over a year," he continued, and Merlin, did that hurt to hear, "which should be time enough for you to realize that the world does not owe you anything, least of all a hero. It does not have reasons. It does not have reassurances. And it is. Never. Going. To apologize," he said, these last words punctuated with a finality that was impossible to argue with.

"Accept that fact, or you may well wake up one day to find yourself transformed into something as vile as a human cockroach. I say this for _your_ benefit only, because, let me assure you, I will not lose any sleep over it. What I will not abide, however, is your building an effigy in my place just for the pleasure of feeling betrayed when it burns."

"You used me," she whispered, throat burning. "You — you're a — a —"

"A what? A _monster_?" his lip curled. "Did you forget just who and what I am, Bartleby? Allow me to remind you —"

And, without warning, he suddenly lunged toward her, fisted his hand in her shirt, and pulled her within inches of his face. " _Legilimens!_ "

But instead of rifling through her mind, Snape was pouring his memory into her.

Snape's memory wasn't anything like the Memoriball. She wasn't standing outside someone's recollection, a passive observer, as had been the case when she, Myron, and the reporter watched Myron's concert in London. No, this memory was in first person. She knew the date, somehow — March 21st, 1982, just hours before her 17th birthday a year ago — and she was sitting at Snape's desk.

No — she _was_ Snape, sitting at his own desk. She _became_ him, in the memory — felt his pounding headache, his nausea, his hangover.

Outside the office door, she could hear Memory-Amy and that boy arguing, every syllable scratching at the nerves of her skull like fingernails against a chalkboard.

_"So who will you fuck, now that your cousins are in Azkaban, Scrivener?" the boy said. "That's what you Pureblood fanatics do, right? Fuck your own cousins?"_

_"Since you brought up fucking, why don't you clear something up for me?" Memory-Amy slurred back. "Does it even...you know...work the same way, with you Muggles? Do you even have a todger down there? Or is it just_ — _"_

Amy felt Snape's exasperation as though it were her own. Merlin, what would it take for these fucking children to just _shut up?_ He was too exhausted to attend to this; too hungover to care. Let them work it out on their own, the miserable little fools. Snape did the only thing that made sense; he cast a Silencing Spell on the door. She felt his relief as the idiotic argument faded from his hearing and he raised his fingers to his temples to rub the tension away.

Just as suddenly as the connection began, it ended. Amy found herself mentally flung from Snape's head and physically flung from his body. She skidded several feet back, struggling to balance, and gasped.

So.

He had been in his office.

He had been in his office the _entire time._

And, if only—if only—

Across from her, Snape ran his fingers through his greasy hair in an agitated gesture. As if reading her thoughts, he answered them, his every syllable dripping in defensiveness. "How could I have known? I couldn't _possibly_ have known. And I have made my amends the only way I could."

That's when Amy started to bolt.

He caught her painfully by the wrist. "I did _not_ dismiss you."

"Let me go!"

There was a crackling spark of magic between them, and—miraculously—he did. He let go very suddenly, as though burned. She caught a brief vision of him cradling a very bloody hand before she left. His enraged voice chased her down the corridor:

"Don't you dare walk away from me—Bartleby! _BARTLEBY_!"

* * *

When she gets back to the common room, she will look at the notice board. Snape hasn't updated it all year, of course, but it has been plastered all over with pictures of dead people. Some were family photos, like the picture of the Lestrange's wedding she herself posted there only a few weeks ago. Others were candid shots, and a few were from newspaper clippings, including a truly chilling image from the Lestrange trial. It was the last known photo of the nineteen-year-old Bartemus Crouch Jr. In it, he is doomed to shout the word 'Father!' over and over again in black-and-white futility.

Amy seized it by the frame, this massive collage of a monument to the dead, and pulled as hard as she could. It came tumbling down with an almighty crash, and people in the common room stared at her.

"Bloody hell," one of them said.

The truth?

She said earlier that the truth is that there is no truth, but that was a lie. A 'metaphysical dodge' as one of Myron's philosophy books might say.

The truth is that she is absolutely terrified.

It has been over a year, and she is still as frightened of the world as she was on the day it betrayed her. She is still as angry with it, and, if she could, she would force it to invert itself, and she would pick through the devastation for a reason. She would dig through the mantle for reassurance and beat on molten lava for an apology until there was nothing left of her but ashes scattering through the wind and sea. Every particle of her former self would settle in the depths and wait through the eons for a better race of people to evolve.

The truth is that her sanity is a string of glass beads under Snape's heel, and the only thing that frightens her more than the thought of him stepping down is the thought of him walking away.


	11. Part 2 - The End

**Author's Notes:** This is a fanfic - Standard disclaimers apply. I own nothing.

Thank you again to those who favorited/followed/reviewed. Please do review; any feedback is appreciated.

***Caution* - This chapter contains graphic depictions of violence.**

**A/N: 12.23.20 -**

**Thank you, readers. You made this possible. More author's notes at the end.**

* * *

**Part 2**

Amy spent most of Sunday morning sitting in the corridor of her rapist's memory.

The Memoriballs containing the worst day of her life were banned under threat of expulsion. So, naturally, everyone had a copy. It hadn't been difficult to find one. She couldn't quite bring herself to go into the empty classroom where _it_ was actually happening, so she waited in the corridor and merely listened as he raped her.

God, she hated even thinking it.

She literally hated having to think the sentence "He raped her."

"He" is a subject-pronoun in the nominative case and that would make "her" the direct object. A thing objectified.

So she tried at first to think in passive voice that "She was raped by him." That helped a little bit because "she" was now in the nominative case and "him" in the objective.

But it was merely a cheap syntactic move. "He" was still the logical subject who performed the action, while "she" was only the grammatical subject and therefore still the recipient.

Besides, she hated passive voice. Her English was made awkward by it.

This is what she was thinking about when Snape – real Snape, not memory-Snape – showed up. She hadn't been waiting for him, but she was neither particularly surprised nor particularly happy to hear the _click-click_ staccato of his boots against the stone.

The sound got louder as he approached.

_c_ _lick-click._

_c_ _lick-click_

It came to an abrupt halt just in front of her.

She heard, but didn't see, because she had her face pressed into her knees. Not to hide her tears – though there were plenty – but to hide her nose from the slaughterhouse stench she knew was coming.

Snape nudged her with the toe of his boot.

"Get up, girl."

Something tense and thin colored his voice. And isn't it ironic that Snape, the big bad Death Eater who could make his own curses and spells and had done things she couldn't even imagine, was the one who didn't want to be within ten miles of this place when it started?

She didn't care; she was going to make him listen.

No, not to the rape.

That started about three minutes ago. If you listened hard enough, you could hear these whimpering, panicked little mouse noises under throaty grunts. The point-counterpoint as he…as she was raped by him.

Snape's boot nudged her again.

"Have you any idea what sitting in a memory for any length of time can do to a person? Particularly one as woefully inept as yourself? Seizures are possible. Heart attacks. You might slip into a coma and die."

He might be right about that, because she didn't feel well at all.

"Get up. _Now_ ," he said, and there was an angry urgency to it, this time, as though dragging her—Present Amy—out would do a damned bit of good for the girl in the other room.

Then, somewhere off-stage, Memory-Amy began to beg.

It was like working a verbal combination lock with the words "please," "no" and "I'm sorry" in the place of numbers. She remembered trying every combination possible, certain that if she just found the right sequence of words, it would stop.

"Please – No! – I'm sorry!"

"I'm sorry – Please – No –"

And so on.

But every word fell from her mouth as useless as a baby bird. And there was this complete disbelief that this was really happening, and that, for the first time in her life, her words held no meaning. They didn't matter to _him_.

"Bartleby, if you do not get up and leave this memory of your own accord, I _will_ physically drag you out," Snape snapped, and you would've had to have been deaf not to hear the panic in his voice.

That's when Memory-Amy began to drown.

At least, that's what it sounded like. It's what it had felt like, too.

She remembered how the first wave engulfed her and knocked her off her feet. It receded and, struggling up, she saw the stars glittering overhead, stretched out across the vast universe. She wailed at them and, staggering, reached out, but the sand gave out beneath her feet and she fell. She was aware of the sting of the pebbles rasping against her cheek, the taste of saltwater down her throat, an undulating whine in her ears. Her hands scrambled at the coast, trying to gain hold, but another wave engulfed her, and she felt her body dragged back into deeper water. Half-insane, she tried to raise her head, tried to breathe, raging against the terror and the blackness of the sea. And then the third wave came, which lifted her and slammed her against the stone of the beach. She gasped, and her lungs filled with water, and where once there were stars, there was nothing.

 _Nothing_.

It hit her like a bludger to the chest. There was this knowledge, this dread realization that, yes, this really was happening, and no, there was nobody coming to save her. The godless sky dawned a turgid red, and suddenly she was absolutely filled with _rage_.

She wanted to tell her rapist – to scream at him – to somehow _make him understand_ that her body was a place built to have orgasms and babies, and that his violence and terror had no place there.

That was me.

The author.

That's what I wanted to say.

Amy Scrivener did not need to say those words because she was the heroine of a feminine revenge fantasy, and in her world, curse words were literal. And so, when the final wave struck, Amy used her words to push it back into him. She pushed the _entire ocean_ into him, and he'd staggered.

It had begun.

"God damn you," Snape hissed at her, and here he reached out as if to seize her by the arm. Her magic lashed out before he even touched her. There was the skittering of lightning, and he withdrew as if burned.

"Fine. Stay here. Die here, for all I care!" She heard his boots storming away.

_Click-click._

_Click-click._

They say that murder is an act against nature. A violation that rips the soul to pieces. Maybe they were right about that; maybe her soul was damaged and damned and that's why she's grown so used to the gnawing emptiness at the pit of her stomach. It made sense, but she couldn't help feeling skeptical about the whole idea of a soul in the first place.

You see, Amy's seen every part of a human being.

Every.

Single.

Part.

And she doesn't remember seeing anything that looked like a soul.

There was a long, low moan coming from the other room, a hacking cough, and all at once the wet, sickening slop like meat hitting the stone floor of a butcher's shop.

Those were his intestines.

She remembered how they came up first, like slimy pink-and-grey sausages filled with shit and shot through with pulsating blood vessels. If she walked in there right now, she'd see him choking on the endless deluge of gore, sputtering, and trying to bite down—bite _through_ his own entrails—as if that could stop it.

The moaning continued. It was a horrible noise, one of unspeakable agony, and it was punctuated here and there with more fleshy slops as his organs unfurled, blossoming bright bloody red, into the world. She remembered seeing something dark and kind of lop-sided. A kidney, maybe. Or perhaps it was his liver. She was never very good at anatomy.

As impossible as it seems, the skin and muscles and very bones shifted and changed, and it was incredible that something in that contorted bag of red and wet could still scream, but it _did_. It screamed and screamed a veritable opera of agony with high notes and low; a loud, shrieking melody trailing slowly into a quiet, echoing groan.

The slaughterhouse stench of mingling blood and shit and burning hair hit her nose at precisely the same moment she heard Snape swear. He hadn't left, after all, but was pulling her to her feet, ignoring the way her magic burned him, physically dragging her from the memory just like he'd promised he would do.

She caught just the smallest glimpse of herself, of Memory-Amy, as Snape steered her past the open door of the classroom.

The girl was backed up against the wall, standing with bloody knickers twisted around her ankles, blood spatter in her hair, blood soaking through the fabric of her skirt where the words DEATH EATER WHORE were carved into her thigh.

Her hand was over her mouth in a parody of polite surprise, like a girl frozen in social faux pas. Then she closed her eyes and began to scream. To scream and scream until there were no more sounds left under her skin.

* * *

There was silence. And darkness. And pain.

Then, slowly, gentle academic noises filtered through the vast soundscape of nothingness: The soft susurration of cloth teaching robes, the light bubbling of a school-issued cauldron, the dull sound of a knife against a cutting board.

The pain began to localize: a tension in the temples and muscles at the back of her neck; a multi-colored migraine tugging on her optic nerves.

Amy – Present Amy – opened her eyes to a painful squint and found herself in 1983 again, slumped in a chair in Snape's office. His desk had been cleared of undone grading and stupid ministry pamphlets and even specimens. A clean slate.

She moved to sit up and immediately abandoned the gesture with a groan. Her head, like concrete on her shoulders, sunk back to rest on the chair.

"Back among the conscious, I see?" observed a sour voice to her left.

Amy turned her head gingerly in the direction of the sound and found Snape fussing over a cauldron, his mouth pressed into a thin line of irritation. His familiar, infinitely-harassed look was marred by fatigue, complete with dark circles polluting the whiteness under his eyes.

"How did I get here?"

"With a great deal of effort on my part," he answered tersely, and slid whatever he'd been chopping into the cauldron with a gentle hiss. Then he wiped his hands on a damp rag and moved toward her. His hand approached her forehead, as if to feel for a fever.

She had every intention of slapping it away, but found that her muscles wouldn't obey. Sick with her own powerlessness, she managed only a hateful, "Don't."

"Don't be difficult," he countered irritably, and pressed the backs of his long, white fingers against her forehead. She was appalled that his touch should still feel so familiar; so pleasantly cool.

"I'm still angry with you," she said. But even as she said it, she realized how pointless her anger was. How futile. She may as well have been angry with the night for being dark.

"Of course you are," he replied indifferently as he withdrew his hand. Then the lighted tip of his wand was shining in her eyes, and he was muttering something to himself about "anisocoria."

A distant sound of clapping interrupted the intimacy of the moment.

"The leaving feast," he explained. "We're directly beneath the Great Hall. You are free to leave when it is over, provided you can move." He sounded almost…envious. Like a prisoner whose cellmate is getting paroled.

"But not you," she said, with no small amount of petty satisfaction.

"Not me," he agreed.

Dumbledore's magically amplified voice trickled down from the ceiling, the words of his end-of-term speech indistinct, as Snape moved away from her and fussed with the potion some more. He ladled some into a vial to cool, then stood with his arms crossed. The Headmaster summarized the year up above.

They existed like that, on the awkward, ragged edges of somebody else's celebration, for a while.

"He's dead, isn't he?" Amy finally asked. She meant _him_ , her rapist.

"Yes," said Snape smoothly. "In St. Mungo's, around Halloween of last year. Some four months after your trial. But you knew that."

She did, sort of. Even though no-one but the Thestrals told her.

"I should be in Azkaban."

His eyes narrowed contemptuously. "Why? Because you panicked and performed a spell you learned _fishing_?"

"He's dead," she said, and repeating it made it feel a little more weighty, a little more real.

Snape merely made an impatient noise that suggested he thought little of the sanctity of human life. "Charming though your self-blame is, it was an open-and-shut case of self-defense. There was no need to involve the ministry, or to drag you through the mud, or to waste my time with ridiculous questions concerning my opinion on the length of your skirt."

"They really asked that?"

"Yes, they really asked that. And you very nearly _did_ go to Azkaban."

He picked up the vial and tipped some of its contents, which had cooled into a thick, jelly-like substance, onto the fingers of one hand. He then moved toward her once more and rubbed the potion into her temples. The relief was instant and profound – her headache eased wherever the potion touched, and her muscles unlocked under his ministrations.

When her angry tears began spilling over onto her cheek, he moved behind her and began massaging the potion into the muscles at the back of her neck, moving her hair gently out of the way as he did so.

Up above, there was another barely-audible round of applause as the Headmaster concluded his speech.

"So…why am I not in Azkaban, then?" Amy asked quietly.

"Many reasons," Snape responded behind her. "The foremost being that Abraxas Malfoy resigned his Governorship and vowed to ignite a culture war of such magnitude it would make us all look forward to the rise of a new dark lord. Five years ago he would have succeeded, too. As it was, he agreed to stay quiet in exchange for your liberty, and you thanked him for it by laughing at his funeral."

She didn't need to ask how Abraxas even found out. Snape told him.

"And the memory?"

"I have no idea how it circulated. Some underpaid worker at the Ministry's evidence office looking to make a fast galleon, no doubt."

"And you think things will be somehow different, with Lucius on the Board of Governors?"

"I _know_ they will be," he said, the conviction in his voice mirrored in the sudden force with which he massaged the potion into her neck.

"And will you do something about it, the next time you hear an argument? Or will you cast another Silencing Spell?" Her voice was bitter; all he'd needed to do was poke his head out the door, take points, and tell them to get back to their dorms.

It was his _job_.

His one job.

The hand at her neck stilled, then withdrew. "It was a mistake. I have apologized. I will not spend the rest of my life drowning in guilt, or begging your forgiveness," Snape responded, his voice hard.

And, for all the conviction in those clipped little sentences, she wondered if this was a lie, too. She suspected there was some part of Severus Snape that hated himself unyieldingly. Always. For reasons she could never begin to understand.

She realized that Snape had long since stopped applying the potion and was now settling himself behind his desk, rifling through one of the drawers. She sat up gingerly, finding that, while she still felt weary and weak, the pain and the stiffness were gone, and her muscles obeyed her again.

Snape located an envelope of creamy yellow paper in his drawer and slid it across the desk to her. He tapped on it once with his index finger. "This may be of interest to you."

"What is it?" she asked.

He sighed one of his eon-containing sighs. A sigh of utter defeat. "Just open it."

The first thing she noticed was the date. "This is backdated a week."

"Yes, because you refused to answer my summons."

Oh. He'd just wanted to give her something. She opened the parchment and peeked inside, reading the top line of the message without removing it from the envelope.

**We take great pleasure in awarding this…**

"It's a certificate," she said, surprised.

"Congratulations, Bartleby. As part of your senior exit project, you are now a board-certified editor for the Society of Magical Language Scholars."

She licked her lips, thinking. "You…you did this. This is why you made me copy that style guide. This is why you made me log all those hours I graded. This is -" she paused, remembering that sunny Easter afternoon a lifetime ago "- this is why we stopped in that publisher's office. You weren't submitting a paper."

His hands folded together on the desk before him. "No. That was the necessary paperwork for your certification. The senior editor is quite happy to offer you a position, by the way."

"So," Amy said quietly, "this is you 'helping' me."

She probably should have been more grateful.

Snape leaned back in his seat and leveled an unfathomable gaze at her. So many times in the last year she'd seen something strange in that look – something tender, something remorseful. Now everything felt turned on its head and she realized how foolish, how naïve, she must have been to ever think she could interpret what he felt about her, or about _them_.

"You _told_ me you weren't safe," she found herself saying aloud. "But I still don't understand how sleeping with me fit into all your plans. When we were together, I thought…"

She trailed off. She didn't know what she thought.

Snape seemed to teeter on the edge of speech for a moment. She'd never seen him hesitate like that before, as if poised for confession.

"If it was just about sex, then -"

He held up a hand to stop her, then paused for what seemed like an age. When he finally did speak, it was as though it physically pained him to do so. Like he was dredging up the words from the very bottom of his soul:

"No, Bartleby. I only wanted, for once, to own something clean."

It was, in its own appalling way, the nicest thing he'd ever said to her.

* * *

The 7th-year girls dormitories were almost bare.

Everyone was supposed to be at the leaving feast, or at the graduation ceremony. Amy had rather lost track of time and wasn't sure which was supposed to be happening at just that moment. It didn't matter; she wouldn't be going to either. The house-elves had taken the opportunity to strip everything. They'd already sent the luggage to the train, taken the sheets and hangings from the beds for laundering. Bits of parchment and broken quills and the occasional abandoned sock littered the floor, and lake-filtered sunlight streamed through the window, pallid and green.

Amy sat on one of the naked beds and tried to feel something about the last seven years - something reflective or nostalgic.

"Oh."

Her neck creaked at she looked up for the owner of the voice. It was Alex, standing hesitantly in the doorway, her graduate's hat askew on her head.

"Sorry," Alex said. "I didn't know you were in here." She seemed unable to fully meet Amy's eyes.

"Do you still want to see it?" Amy asked suddenly.

"See...what?" Alex asked, her brow furrowing in confusion.

"Azkaban," said Amy. "Do you still want to see it?"

Alex's mouth curved into a smile, a shyer version of the one she used to wear just before hurling a beater at the opposing team. "Yeah, yeah, I do."

"Let's go, then," said Amy, standing up. What gave her such certainty that Alex would agree, she had no idea - but she was right. The two girls simply walked out of the castle without a word of explanation - such was their prerogative as former students. They then walked to the apparation point in Hogsmeade, gripped one another by the forearm, and, closing their eyes, spun together into nonexistance.

When they opened their eyes again, they found themselves on the edge of the world where sea met deserted moor. Several miles out, a stone monolith thrust out of the ocean, defying the waves and the wind.

It was a desolate-looking place. Lonely and cold and somehow not quite real.

"He's in there?" asked Amy, nodding to the prison. She meant Alex's uncle.

"Yeah," Alex breathed. "Your cousins, too, right?"

"Right," said Amy. She supposed she had Snape to thank that she stood on the right side of the ocean, free amongst the rocks and heather.

She felt Alex's eyes on her, saw her open her mouth via peripheral vision.

"Why didn't you say anything, Amy?" Alex asked. "You could have told me."

"Could I have?" Amy wondered aloud, eyes on Azkaban. "You, who wouldn't touch a mudblood's sloppy seconds even with Myron's dick?"

Alex's mouth set in a grim line. "I never should have said that. All those stupid jokes I made...I don't know why I said it."

Amy thought that there was an easy answer to that - She'd said it because, at the time, she'd believed it. Simple as that.

"Did you see the memory?" Amy asked by way of response, but of course she knew the answer to that, too.

"Enough of it," Alex replied. Something in her voice changed, became more like her old self. "And you know what, Amy? Fuck that guy. Fuck him. Say it with me - fuck _him._ "

"No, that's dumb, Alex. I'm not saying that."

"Just do it, you stupid bint – fuck him!"

"Fuck him," Amy said quietly.

"Louder!" Alex urged. "FUCK HIM!"

"Fuck him. Fuck him. FUCK HIM!" Amy screamed at the prison. Then she let the sob in her throat bubble out. It felt good, for once, to cry.

She carried on a bit like this, the tears blurring her eyes and burning her throat, and didn't pull away when she felt Alex's fingers intertwine with her own. She held fast to Alex's hand and let the mourning she'd denied for so long wash over her.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Alex asked when she'd quieted.

Amy _did_ talk. She told Alex everything – but not about _him_. She told her about Snape, about the good things he'd done for her, and the bad. She left nothing out, not even the stupid jokes or the cruel commentary. Not the efforts he'd gone through to keep her from Azkaban nor the way he'd so coldly used her story for his own ends. She didn't leave out the editor's certificate and she didn't leave out the sex. Alex listened intently and patiently as the story unfolded, never interrupting.

"I'm not sure how I feel about all that," Alex finally said when the tale was done.

Amy sniffed and wiped her cheek dry, the wind whipping her hair around her face. "I know what you mean."

They called him a prince, but that wasn't quite right. Princes were charming and handsome and if you kissed one you'd get to live happily ever after. She _had_ kissed Snape, but she wouldn't live happily ever after.

She's thought him a god, but that wasn't right, either. Gods were benevolent and forgiving and they didn't need to own little girls to feel better about themselves.

He wasn't a god, or even a god dethroned. He was only a man. A man as weak, as prone to folly, as _human_ as anyone else.

Severus Snape, the Human.

And it was funny that this should come as a revelation.

* * *

**Epilogue - One Year Later**

On June 1st, 1984, Amy sat at her desk in the Diagon Alley Publishing House and stared dubiously into the envelope of free samples from Bertie Botts Every Flavor Bean Company. She jiggled the envelope a little to get a better look, causing Jupiter to look up from his spot under the desk, lick his chops noisily, and stare.

"And why is it necessary to come out with new flavors every year, I wonder?" she asked the dog,

His tail thumped once on the carpet in answer.

"Brown," she said, retrieving the coffee-colored bean in question from the envelope and giving it an appraising look. "It's hardly got the jaw structure for brown, has it?" She chuckled at her own joke.

Jupiter cocked his head minutely.

"Could be fudge, could be shit - but that's life I suppose….Be my guest." Amy said, and let Jupiter take the mystery bean from her fingers. He chewed methodically and mysteriously, giving no hint that he either liked or disliked the flavor.

"That good, huh?" she said.

His tail thumped on the floor again.

Amy shrugged, set the envelope aside, and began sorting the rest of the mail.

Mrs. Flora Bunda of Strausberry Lane sent in some gold to renew her subscription to Herbology Harvest. The landlord wanted his rent. A letter from Myron informed her the Weird Sisters would be playing in Kent next month. This reminded her that she really ought to write Alex back, too.

Then, at the bottom of the pile, a paper submitted for publication.

She opened the thick yellow envelope, pulled a stack of parchment out, and began to read:

**Innovations in the Collection and Long-Term Preservation of Amphibius Morphology: A Review**

**Professor Severus Snape, Potions Master Class III**

_**Despite what a certain past TA may believe, there are, in fact, many conceivable reasons for maintaining an orderly and comprehensive collection of Potions' specimens beyond terrifying first-years…** _

"Ha!" she told Jupiter.

Then she looked in the envelope again and found a card. It had Snape's name and a summer address in Spinner's End on one side, and on the other a short missive in that familiar spidery script:

**Should you prefer to.**

* * *

**A/N – 12.23.2020**

**_Bartleby_ ** **wouldn't exist without the work and help of more people than I can name. Many of them are the authors of some of my favorite books: JKR, Melville, Alice Sebold, Laurie Halse Anderson, Kafka, Anthony Burgess…I could go on.**

**Others are people I know personally, or at least internet-personally: the lovely Scumblackentropy, who Beta'd for me early on. My wonderful partner, who patiently listened when I got drunk enough and therefore brave enough to talk about my dirty little fanfic.**

**_Bartleby_ ** **also wouldn't exist without you, the reader. And so I'd like to thank you, thank you, thank you, for participating in the storytelling. Those who left (and are going to leave) reviews – they mean more to me than I can say. Thank you, thank you, thank you.**

**Finally – and I'm sure this is evident by now from my not-so-subtle self-insertion – _Bartleby_ wouldn't exist without the reality of people who are shitty and selfish, and the violence they inflict on others. On me.**

**I know (because you've told me) that some of you readers have had experiences like Amy's, and like mine. To you, I say this:**

**Maybe the world doesn't have reasons or reassurances. Maybe it will never apologise. But I will.**

**I'm sorry that happened to you. It wasn't your fault. Things do get better.**

**-QB**


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